But not quite all of it. In addition to Adams and Roderick who were captured with Clayton four men remained at Gebel Sherif.
One of the patrol vehicles was driven by Moore, a New Zealander, and with him were Easton and Winchester from the Guards patrol and Tighe, an R.A.O.C. fitter. When the truck caught fire and the bombs and ammunition started to explode they left it and ran up into the rocks for cover. The rest of the patrol assumed that they had been killed or captured and so at 4 p.m. on the afternoon of the 31st these four men and the remaining Italian prisoner were crouching among the rocks of Gebel Sherif in a situation which was far from pleasant.
Not far away, on the plain at the hill’s foot, were the Italians with an aircraft landed beside them. Although they had admittedly had the best of the fight they seem to have lost their nerve for they made no search for Moore and his party, did not bury the dead, and apparently hardly examined the scene of action, though Minutillo officially reported that our losses were “4 morti accertati sul terreno (e forse qualque altro brucciato con la machine)”—which was quite untrue. After having collected Clayton they set off in haste for Kufra—“alle ore 18 s’inizia la marcia notturna di ritorno percorendo a bussola una rotta di sicurezza. II 1 febbraio alle 4 del mattino la colonna é a Cufra.”
During the night, shivering among the rocks, Moore and the others discussed what they should do. The alternatives were not attractive. To make for Kufra, seventy miles away, and surrender to the Italians, or to follow the tracks of the patrol southwards in the hope that they would be picked up. It was largely due to Moore’s encouragement and inspiration that they chose the latter. They decided not to surrender.
So at dawn on February 1st this was the position. Moore—wounded in the foot. Easton—wounded in the throat. Tighe. Winchester. An Italian. A two-gallon tin of water with a bullet hole through it near the top and containing about one and three-quarters gallons. No food. The clothes they wore; everything else had been burnt in the trucks.
This is the record of the next ten days :
February 1st.—Walking southwards following the tracks of the patrol. At some period during this day the Italian disappeared and was picked up later by his own people.
February 2nd and 3rd.—Walking. The night temperatures here at this time must have been near freezing and it was almost impossible to get any sleep and rest.
February 4th.—Tighe beginning to tire: he was feeling the effects of an old operation. They found and ate some lentils thrown away after a meal on their way north.
February 5th.—Tighe could not keep up so he was left with his share of the water in a bottle which they had picked up. Later, when he came to drink it, he found that something the bottle had contained had made the water salty and almost undrinkable.
February 6th.—Sandstorm. The car tracks almost obliterated and very hard to follow. (In the soft sand of the desert, where your foot slips back at every step, one pace is equal—in effort—to three on a hard road.) The first three reached Sarra, 135 miles from Gebel Sherif. At Sarra is a well, two hundred feet deep, which the Italians had filled in, with a few mud huts nearby. In them they found some waste motor oil and bathed their feet and also made a fire out of odd bits of wood. There was no food.
February 7th.—Three walking on. The tracks still hard to see. Tighe reached Sarra and sheltered in the huts, unable to follow the others. On the ground he found one match. It did not fail and he got some comfort from a fire.
February 8th.—Three walking on. Tighe at Sarra.
February 9th.—Late on the evening of the 9th a party of French with Mercer Nairne reached Sarra from the north. They were returning from a reconnaissance of Kufra which I shall describe later on, and had visited Gebel Sherif, buried Beech and the Italians, and called in at Sarra. The Sarra-Kufra track is wide and ill-defined and the northward-bound French had missed Moore and the others. In a hut they found Tighe, weak but conscious. (Imagine his feelings when he heard the sound of their cars!) With his first words he told them of the others ahead. The French tried to follow their footmarks in the sand but in the dark this was impossible and they had to wait till dawn. Meanwhile the others had been walking on. Easton had dropped behind. During the day a French aircraft sighted Moore and Winchester and realised, I suppose, the plight they were in. The ground was too rough for a landing, but the pilot circled round and dropped food and a canvas bag of water. The food Moore and Winchester could not find; the cork of the water bag was knocked out in its fall and when they got it only a mouthful or two remained.
February 10th.—At first light the rescue party left Sarra. They followed the three men’s footsteps and after a time one set turned vaguely off to the west. At the end of them they found Easton, fifty-five miles from Sarra, lying on the ground but alive. Fortunately the French had with them a doctor who took Easton back to Sarra and all that day strove to save his life. But help had come too late and at seven in the evening he died. He kept his sense of humour to the end. The French made some tea for him, weak and sweet. Easton drank it and smiled, “I like my tea without sugar,” he said.
Meanwhile another party was following Moore and Winchester. Sixty-five miles from Sarra Winchester could not continue and Moore gave him half the remaining water—one mouthful—and pushed on. Here the French found him, near delirium but able to stand up when he heard their cars. Ten miles farther south they overtook Moore, then about 210 miles from Gebel Sherif and marching steadily southwards. He felt confident that in three days he could reach Tekro, the nearest water, eighty miles ahead, and was slightly annoyed, so Mercer Nairne told me, at being prevented from proving that he could.
There is a fitting line in Tennyson’s Ulysses—
“To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”
While Moore and those with him were marching southwards T patrol, returning from Gebel Sherif, had met ‘G patrol and Leclerc. The situation was now much changed. The Italians in Kufra were on the alert; T patrol had lost half its vehicles, and all the cars were showing signs of the wear of their long journey from Cairo. They, American Chevrolets, had almost earned the “tribute to British workmanship” which the publicity people at Middle East awarded them in the Press “puff” issued after the raid. So Leclerc decided to form a temporary base at Tekro, reopen Sarra well, make a reconnaissance in force of Kufra and to let our patrols return home. One T patrol truck, Ballantyne’s “Manuka,” stayed with the French, with Kendall and its crew to help them in navigation; the rest of the L.R.D.G. force returned to Cairo by way of ’Uweinat and Kharga, having travelled 4300 miles in the 45 days.
The French reconnaissance party, sixty Europeans and thirty natives in fifteen Bedford trucks, reached Gebel Zurgh, five miles south of Kufra, on February 7th.
That night two parties entered the oasis. Geoffroi with twenty-five men on foot went into Giof, the Italian administrative centre among the palms below the fort. It was quite deserted for, as was learned later, all the Italians retired into the fort at night. All except one, for Geoffroi turned east along the road to the hamlet at Buma and in the radio direction finding station, which four months later was our mess, found one sleepy Italian. He was taken prisoner and the station wrecked.
Meanwhile de Guillebon with three cars had gone to the airfield, de Guillebon—tall, silent, blonde, efficient—was then and for long afterwards Leclerc’s staff officer and one of the most able men in the strangely-assorted Chad force. The airfield was deserted and he burnt the one aircraft he found there. This at last roused the Italians in the fort who started shooting wildly and firing green Verey lights. Now it so happened that a green Verey light was the signal “en avant” to the French reserves at Gebel Zurgh, and a few minutes later, to the dismay of de Guillebon and Geoffroi, the twelve Bedfords with headlights full on came roaring into the oasis. Between Gebel Zurgh and the palmeries lie soft sand and hummocks and soon things became chaotic. The Bedfords stuck badly; “Manuka” tore her sump off on a rock, overturned and had to be abandoned and burned; the Italia
ns in the fort fired all they had got.
But by dawn the situation was restored and the Bedfords started back to Tekro, not without losses from aircraft on the way. Beyond Sarra, as I have described, they found Moore and his companions.
Leclerc now determined to attack. The reconnaissance had been most useful for the French now knew the lie of the land and it was clear that the Italians’ courage was normal. His force was : 101 Europeans, 295 natives, 26 fusils-mitrailleuses (L.M.G.s) 4 M.G.s, 2 37 mms., 4 mortars and one 75 portée.
The advance guard left Sarra on February 17th. On the 18th and again on the 19th the Bedford patrols of Geoffroi and de Rennepont under the leadership of Leclerc fought it out with the Auto-Saharan Company in the broken ground north of the fort. The text-books (with diagrams) would, I think, have called it a “pretty little action” in which the French out-manœuvred the Italians. Geoffroi was heavily bombed on the second day but, by evening, the Auto-Saharan Company was making off to Tazerbo and never appeared on the scene again.
This was the turning point and Kufra was lost to the Italians. If they had not shut themselves up in the fort and lost their only mobile force, the Auto-Saharan Company, this chapter might not have been written, for Leclerc’s supply columns, toiling along through the soft sand from Bishara, were a very vulnerable target, and in the oasis itself, if they had retained their mobility, they might have made things very unpleasant for the French. As it was it was only a matter of time. Ceccaldi put his 75 in a ruined house near the market place and lobbed twenty to thirty shells a day into the fort and by night the French roamed the oasis at will on offensive patrols. The Kufrans left their homes each morning for the palm groves and returned to sleep when the day’s fighting was over.
This went on till February 28th. On that morning a Libyan soldier brought a note down from the fort asking for an arrangement by which each side should place their wounded in an area on to which no fire should be directed. There was something almost mediæval about this request, reminiscent of Saladin’s siege of Kerak in the twelfth century when Reynaud de Chatillon, the besieged Crusader, sent out word that one of his knights was to be married on the morrow and asking for a three days’ lull in the bombardment of the bastion in which the bridal chamber lay.
Leclerc replied that he would only treat with an officer in person so at four that afternoon an Italian officer with a white flag came out to repeat the request, which was refused. Before returning to the fort he asked, “for my purely personal information,” what the terms of surrender would be.
Leclerc then realised that the Italians were finished and put the screw on. The patrols became more active and Ceccaldi doubled the output from his 75. At dawn on the 1st March a white flag was flying over the fort. The Italian rule over Kufra, which had lasted ten years and forty days, was over.
The Italians were inclined to bargain for terms but Leclerc, as the French account says, “brusque les choses” and drove his car into the fort. In the courtyard the garrison paraded—64 Italians, 352 Libyans—leaving behind them 53 M.G.s and 4 20 mm. Bredas. They were terrified of the French native troops and begged that none of them should be allowed into the fort, so all day the French priest, le père Bronner, stood sentry at the gate protecting the representatives of a great colonial empire.
Even after the flight of the Auto-Saharan Companies the Italians could have held out in Kufra for weeks, but they had no heart in the job. In the signal room at the fort was a copy of the commander’s last message :
“We are inextremis. Long live Italy. Long live the King Emperor. Long live the Duce. Rome I embrace you.”
Positions are not held on such stuff as this.
When the Italians took Kufra from the Senussi in 1931 their victory was hailed as a great achievement in desert warfare and in good “Q” work. And so it was, though the Senussi had no aircraft, no mechanical transport and no artillery. In 1941 the Italians had all these and yet were beaten by Leclerc whose supply problem was infinitely more difficult than theirs had been.
The Italians made no attempt to retake Kufra and from that date until the end of the war in Africa did nothing more than a a little bombing which cost each side four or five aircraft and us an equal number of casualties. For seven months in 1941 and for another seven months in 1942 Kufra was an invaluable base for L.R.D.G. We owed a great deal to Leclerc and his men.
1 In what, follows all facts relating to the Italians are taken from Lt. Minutillo’s report on the action at Gebel Sherif, found later at Kufra.
2 Popolo d’Italia, 18.10.41.
CHAPTER SIX
SUMMER AT KUFRA
BY THE END of April, 1941, Group Headquarters and R, S and T patrols were at Kufra and Mitford had G and Y at Siwa as a detached squadron under the command of Desforce, the predecessor of the Eighth Army. On the coast the front line stood at Solium and the siege of Tobruk had begun.
We had come to Kufra by our old route from Cairo to ’Ain Dalla, across the Sand Sea to Big Cairn and thence south-westwards, and on the morning of April 20th first saw the eastern palm groves of the oasis. We halted for breakfast on the rolling sand beyond the airfield and Bagnold, as became the Military Commander Designate, shaved and changed his shirt.
For a desert enthusiast like myself the first sight of Kufra was a never-to-be-forgotten event. For Kufra, till the Italians took it, was a story-book oasis, unattainable, remote, mysterious, the last goal of all African explorers.
Like many other Libyan oases it lies at the southern foot of an east-west scarp, in a long trough hollowed out by the wind action of thousands of years till the desert surface had been lowered to meet the water table. Virtually no rain falls in the Libyan Desert so it is something of a mystery where the ample water supplies of the oases come from. The theory which holds most favour with geographers is that the water which has fallen as rain in the Tibesti Mountains or in the area of Lake Chad percolates under pressure through the sandstone strata which lie under the desert and comes to the surface in the oasis-depressions.
From the high wireless masts in the Italian fort at Et Tag, built over the ruins of the Senussi zawia, you could see the whole oasis—thousands of date palms, thinly scattered on the upper slopes and thicker around the salt marshes; the mosque and market place at El Giof; the two sapphire-blue lakes as salt as the Dead Sea, though you could dig a well of sweet water five yards from the margin; the tiny patches of cultivation, laboriously irrigated by donkey-hauled leather buckets from shallow wells.
Of course the place was poor, without the palms life would have been impossible. There is no limit to what this wonderful tree provides for its owners—dates for food; palm-wine for drink; timber for building and firewood; leaves for thatch, baskets, mats and sandals; fibre for ropes.
After some initial severity the Italians had done well by Kufra—built a school, a hospital, a market and a mosque, though the Arabs, preferring their old Senussi building, thought nothing of the latter and readily and rather surprisingly lent it to us for a ration store. The Italians collected no taxes and their introduction of motor transport did something to reduce the isolation. For it is difficult to exaggerate the loneliness of the oasis. In English geographical equivalents, taking Kufra as London, the nearest places where you could be sure of finding another human being who would give you a drink of water were Rebiana (Salisbury), Bzema (Coventry) or Tazerbo (Liverpool), while to be certain of a glass of beer you must go to Benghazi (Berlin).
Kufra—the Secret of the Sahara! When the Italians occupied it all its romance was ended, but sitting there that April morning, while the advance party went in, I could think back over a century of its history.
Back to its first discoverer, a Majbri from Jalo, looking, no doubt, for the inevitable lost camel which has led to so many desert discoveries. (Ask any nomad in North Africa where he is going and nine out of ten will answer, “I’m looking for a camel I’ve lost.” Having found it he hobbles it with an entirely inadequate piece of rope and so is soon lookin
g for it again.)
And back to the great Sayed Mohammed el Mahdi es Senussi who from Kufra had raised the Senussi to the peak of their power. Back to Rohlfs the German, in 1879 the first European to visit it, barely escaping with his life. Beyond the palms stood Qaret en Nasrani, the “Christian’s Hill,” where he had camped his first night. And, forty years after Rohlfs, to Lapierre and his companions, captured in the Fezzan when the tribes rose against the Italians in 1914 and kept prisoners of the Senussi in Kufra for five weary years. Back to Hassanein and Rosita Forbes coming by camel from Jaghbub in 1921 and to Hassanein again, two years later, setting out alone from Kufra on the greatest African camel journey of our century to discover Arkenu and ’Uweinat. To Bruneau de Laborie passing from Chad to Cairo in 1924. And lastly to that fateful January morning in 1931 near Hawari when Arab freedom in Libya ended and their great leaders fought their last fight—’Abd el Galil Seif en Nasr; ’Abd el Hamid Bu Matari; Suleiman his brother and Saleh el Ateiwish. A century of great men and great deeds.
And now they were dead or forgotten and I looked across the palms and the patches of salt marsh to the bomb-shattered hangar at Buma and the wireless masts towering over the remains of the Senussi zawia on the hill at Et Tag, and the Italian brothel by the roadside below the fort.
After breakfast we moved in and sought a camping place. There were some half-ruined mud and stone houses at Buma and we put the Headquarters and Signals into these. For an officers’ mess we used the D.F. station which Geoffroi had halfburned down in February, and I collected the local masons and started to build sleeping quarters alongside the mess, a series of hermit-like cells whose design pleased me greatly. I learned, too, a tip to scotch all the queries of Army auditors—to pay wages in French francs and in Italian lire converted from Egyptian pounds and keep all the accounts in Arabic on the excuse that my Arab clerk of works understood nothing else.
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