It was a burning hot summer day and soon they were all suffering terribly from thirst. At midday one man was hiding in the thin shade of some tamarisk bushes, halfway across the plain. All around were Italians listlessly combing the scrub, some on foot, some with bicycles. Suddenly round the tamarisk bush came a soldier, pushing his machine. It looked like the end of the war as far as the parashot was concerned, but the Italian had left his rifle behind and was unarmed. The other dared not risk the sound of a shot. For a moment they gazed at each other, weighing up their chances. Then the Italian tried persuasion :
“Campo, campo,” he said. “Agua, mangeria.”
“B——off,” from the parashot.
“No, no. Campo, campo,” repeated the Italian.
“All right, if you must have it,” said the parashot, and strangled him.
On the 14th Stirling and Mayne rejoined Gurdon and two days later started for Benghazi again. This time their objective was the harbour and they drove past Benina where the hangars were still smouldering. West of the aerodrome was the roadblock but this time in the place of easy-going Italians there were Germans on guard, alert after the events of two nights before.
The bar was across the road and as Stirling stopped the car the German N.C.O. came out into the headlights, demanding identity cards and passwords. But this had been foreseen and one of the parashot party spoke German. He began to spin a tale to the sergeant. They were just out of the front line, had been driving day and night from Gazala; surely he wasn’t going to keep them hanging about now on the outskirts of Benghazi when they wanted to hurry on and get a bath and a drink. And more in that strain.
The N.C.O. began to waver and in the glare of the lights, as Stirling told me later, he could see the man’s face struggling with a decision. His expression showed that he was almost sure that the party was bogus but if he forced the issue he would have about five seconds more to live. He thought better of it, lifted the barrier and Stirling drove through.
But one thing after another delayed and hindered them and they had to turn back before reaching the port. All the latter part of the night they were bumping back over the plain towards the escarpment the top of which they reached at dawn. There for some trivial reason the truck halted for a moment, the engine running quietly. In the comparative silence someone in the back heard the sharp click of a time pencil going off, and immediately afterwards another. At his wild shout of warning each man leapt from the car and ran for his life. When they were about thirty yards away the whole load of bombs went off and the truck simply disintegrated but by a miracle no one was hurt.
While the parashots had been away G patrol carried fifty pounds of ammonal and buried it under the Barce-Benghazi railway. They could not wait to watch the result but next day the sentry at the rendezvous reported a heavy explosion and clouds of smoke rising from the direction of the line.
Four days later the party was back in Siwa again.
It was about this time Almasy first showed up.
Though the Axis could not produce a counterpart to Bagnold, for Bagnold was unique, they had an ersatz Bagnold in Almasy. We had realised this as soon as L.R.D.G. was formed and kept an eye open for him, for there are ways and means of finding out where people are and what they are doing, even in Hungary in 1940, but in those early days Almasy did not seem likely to give us trouble.
A year passed without further news. Then from a sign here and there, from a letter foolishly preserved by a German soldier, from a careless word in a prisoner of war cage and from those other sources of information which the Censor would strike out if I set them down, we realised that Almasy was on the move.
“Who,” you ask, “is this Almasy?”
Ladislaus Edouard de Almasy, Count (?) of Szombathely, Hungary. Motorist. Aviator. Traveller. Explorer (of a sort). Author. Linguist. Spy (?). Educated in England. Speaking many languages perfectly. A friend (or so we once thought) of the English. A friend (but for different reasons) of the Egyptians.
I had last seen Almasy in the Mess of the Western Arab Corps at El Fasher in the Sudan in March, 1935. While he and I sat and argued about the position of a “lost” oasis, Mike Mason was drawing a caricature of Almasy’s sharp alert profile on the back of an envelope.
He first appeared in the Libyan Desert in 1929 accompanying the Prince of Lichtenstein on a journey from East Africa to Egypt by car. From then until the outbreak of the Nazi war Almasy was often travelling in Libya, usually at somebody else’s expense. He had a real passion for the desert and much of it he knew extremely well. He had been to ’Uweinat with Robert Clayton and Penderel in 1932; to Kufra a year later; to ’Uweinat with Frobenius, the German archaeologist, in the autumn of that year, and to the north-western Sudan with a party of Hungarians in the spring of 1935.
He had some discoveries to his credit of which the most important was the fine group of prehistoric rock paintings found at ’Ain Dua in ’Uweinat in 1933. An Italian archæologist by name Caporiacco, and later the German Frobenius, tried to steal the credit for the discovery which was justly due to Almasy, and for some months an acrimonious correspondence trailed its way through the columns of German and Italian scientific magazines. I think all the governments interested in the Libyan Desert—British, Egyptian, Italian—wondered if Almasy was a spy working for the other side. The Italian officials in Kufra were careless and when the French captured the oasis they found in the archives, foolishly unburnt, enough evidence to put Almasy into a concentration camp if not up against a wall. But even so I doubt if he was really an agent in the Italians’ pay and in any case they did not trust him for on his return to Cairo after his expedition in 1933 they managed, by an ingenious trick which the Kufra papers describe, to steal a copy of his maps and his report.
Matters looked worse for Almasy in 1938 when he was taking von Esch for trips into the desert between Solium and Alexandria and paying special attention to the rain water cisterns which, except for the wells close to the sea, are the only source of water in that barren area. That von Esch was a German spy no one doubted, though as a nephew of General von Schleicher who had been murdered by the Nazis he might have been expected to be no friend of their regime.
So we were rather sore when, in the spring of 1942, we realised that Almasy, turning on the British and Egyptians who had befriended him, had thrown in his lot with the Huns. Though to do him justice in the years before the war he had never made any bones about his admiration for Totalitarianism.
In the winter and spring of that year we had little to go on. It was known that Almasy was in Libya, attached to the Afrika Korps, but not exactly what he was doing.
Then early one morning in June the Arab watchman on the landing ground at Kharga saw a car approaching as he stirred himself from sleep. The car stopped and an officer leaned out, speaking to him Arabic : he wanted to know just where the road to Asyut left the oasis. The Arab showed him and the car drove off. It was a British type of car and no doubt, thought the watchman, the officer was British. These mad foreigners were always roaming about the desert and a few of them spoke Arabic. He turned his thoughts to breakfast.
The next morning at about the same time the same car passed him returning from Asyut and drove off westwards into the desert. “Well,” thought the watchman, “that’s a bit odd. I may as well tell the Mudir.” So he told the Mudir who forwarded a report through the “usual channels” which finally reached someone in Cairo who wondered if there really had been a British car in Kharga at that time on that day and took the trouble to find out.
Then more things began to happen and two and two looked like adding up to four. First, there were indications, through what were known as “reliable sources,” that Almasy might be getting more active. Second, a S.D.F. officer on his way from Wadi Haifa to Kufra passed three cars near Wadi Sura on the west side of the Gilf. They waved and he waved back but later, when he mentioned the meeting in Kufra, there was some doubt as to who they had been, for no other S.D.F. party was known t
o be out at that place and time. Thirdly, there was the dog. It was a tiresome dog and it barked at night so that the neighbours in the Cairo suburb complained, first to the owners and then to the police. The police investigated the complaint and were not quite satisfied about the identity of the owners. They made further inquiries and to cut a long story short Herren Reichert and Vollhardt, German spies, found themselves in a prison camp. There they talked, quite a lot.
But we heard of all this too long after the event. Some clever fellow in Cairo thought he knew more about catching Almasy than L.R.D.G., the only people who had both the organisation to do the job and the personal knowledge of Almasy and what he was likely to do and where he was likely to go.
Gradually the story came out. The “Sonderkommando Almasy” was based on Jalo in the spring of 1942, organised in six small patrols rather on the lines of L.R.D.G. In June Almasy with two or three cars had sneaked down past Kufra, through the Gilf and across the desert to Kharga and on to Asyut where he dropped Reichert and Vollhardt. While they went on to Cairo Almasy returned safely to Jalo. Though Reichert and Vollhardt achieved nothing it was a good effort, a 900-mile run through enemy country and worthy of Almasy’s desert craft.
The only place where cars can get through the Gilf north of Wadi Firaq is at the Gap (El Aqaba) where a winding sandy wadi, in places only ten yards wide, leads up from the western plain to the top of the plateau. Clayton had first noticed the place in 1931, but Almasy and Penderel, a year later, had been the first to go through. It was both common sense and in keeping with Almasy’s character, proud of his own discoveries, to use this route, and as soon as the news reached us we sent out a party from Kufra to mine the narrow passage and later put a watching post there. But it was too late; the fresh car tracks showed that he had passed through to the east and returned.
That, I think, was the end of him. Perhaps he kept a road watch on the Matruh-Alexandria road, but I doubt it. There were never any reports of raids against our lines of communications or airfields which sounded as if they were the work of the Axis’ L.R.D.G. When Jalo was taken there were no signs of Almasy there. There were more in Hon when we got there; indications of a “Sonderkommando Dora” which appeared to be a similar organisation, a few German sun compasses and other special kit, but it seems that he achieved little though he had good opportunities.
In October, 1941, Ballantyne with T1 patrol was doing a job near Benghazi, looking for places at which the escarpment south of Regima could be crossed. On the way back he picked up a party of Germans who were out in a couple of trucks collecting spare parts from derelict British vehicles. As they were only fifty miles from Benghazi and the front line was then at Solium the Huns were extremely surprised when the New Zealanders rounded them up.
On the journey back to Siwa the German officer became talkative and by that time he had seen a good deal of the way L.R.D.G. worked. “You know,” he said to Ballantyne, “we Germans couldn’t do this sort of thing—out five hundred miles from our base for days or weeks on end. We like to go about in a crowd.”5
He may or may not have been right : anyhow Almasy failed.
1 “Oh for the dates of Siwa and the curds of Gargaresh!”
2 There is so much misunderstanding about the Senussi that it may be useful to explain here just who they are. The Senussi are not a tribe but the members of a Moslem religious sect which demands a fairly strict adherence to the Moslem code. The founder of the sect, Sayed Mohammed Ibn Ali es Senussi, settled in Cyrenaica at the beginning of the last century. Finding the Moslems there divided into a large number of religious sects, he united them by evolving the Senussi code which was a sort of common denominator to which they could all adhere and at the same time a return to a purer form of Moslem observance. Senussi influence spread rapidly over North-east Africa and by the end of the century had attained to considerable temporal as well as to spiritual power. The present head of the sect, Sayed Idris es Senussi, grandson of the founder, has been a firm friend of Great Britain throughout the war. Probably 85 per cent of the Arabs of Cyrenaica recognise him as their spiritual leader though in Tripolitania he has fewer followers.
3 The Indian Long Range Squadion, consisting of Squadron H.Q. and four patrols and commanded by Major S. V. McCoy, had been formed in Syiia in the winter of 1941-2. The squadron operaled under command of L.R.D.G. from Siwa in the summer of 1942 and from Kufra and Hon in the following autumn and winter.
4 These Road Houses (Casa Cantieri) are placed every 20 km. or so along the coast road. They serve as a halting place for convoys, base for road-gangs, etc.
5 Six months after writing this I read in Alan Moorehead’s book, The End in Africa : “It appeared to me as I travelled among the prisoners, especially the Germans, that they lacked the power of individual thought and action. They had been trained as a team, for years the best fighting team in the world. They had never been trained to fight in small groups or by themselves…. And so they leaned heavily on the machine and trusted it. They never tried out the odd exciting things we did—things like the Long Range Desert Group…. They liked to do things en masse.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SIWA, ’ALAMEIN, FAIYUM
ON May 27th, 1942, Rommel attacked the Gazala line, forestalling by a few days an advance by the Eighth Army and in the month which followed came some of the bitterest fighting of the Libyan war—“Knightsbridge,” “The Cauldron,” Acroma, Bir Hakim. Three days after it started things seemed so much in our favour that we never dreamed that in a month we should be leaving Siwa, where part or all of L.R.D.G. had been based since the spring of 1941, and which we had left with such high hopes in January en route for Jalo.
But the fall of Tobruk and the withdrawal from Solium left us no choice. The Matruh road was cut on June 27th and if we did not hurry we would barely get away through Qara.
Having to leave Siwa was a serious blow, for it was an ideal base. Covered by the forces at Jaghbub, with good water, good quarters, a good road to the coast, too far for enemy raiders to worry us, it had all the advantages. However, we still had Kufra and it was clear that in future all the forward raiding would have to be done from there.
The move itself was a pretty problem. When a normal unit of the size of the L.R.D.G. has to move the C.O. can probably give verbal orders to his officers, or at least written ones, for they should all be within a few miles at the most. Prendergast’s problem was to fit in the following moves :
S2 at the Marble Arch road watch to go to Kufra, for by the time they had handed over to the relieving patrol Siwa would be in enemy hands.
Y1 en route to the Marble Arch road watch.
R1 to leave Siwa to take over from Y1.
T2 and R2 to go straight to Kufra across the Sand Sea, not an ideal June journey.
“A” Sqn. H.Q. to Kufra, going via Cairo for supplies.
All the rest of the patrols and Group H.Q. to ’Alamein via Qara.
We left little or nothing of use to the Axis in Siwa and the Rear Party got away on June 28th preceded by a few hours by an aircraft carrying a man whose appendix Dick Lawson had cut out the night before.
At Gerawla on the coast road we met and joined that amazing stream of traffic, the retreat to ’Alamein. For two days we drove in the stream and then five miles east of ’Alamein pulled out of it into the sand dunes, to wait and hope that we need go no farther east.
We camped among the scrub and low dunes of silver sand. On one side lay the sea and half a mile away on the other the main road, running along a ridge of low hills. For four or five days we stayed there and whenever you looked out to the south, day or night, morning or evening, you saw the same sight—a long-line of transport, head to tail, orderly, moving slowly back to Alexandria. How many trucks passed in those days I have no idea, perhaps fifty thousand, perhaps a hundred thousand; a whole army was on the move. And then you realised what the Eighth Army owed to the Desert Air Force for scarcely one Axis aircraft came over to strafe this perfect target. What
havoc they could have caused, for example, on the causeway below ’Amiriya as I saw it one morning, with a tank transporter on its side across the embankment and a double line of traffic waiting an hour till the block was cleared.
The Official History, when it is published, will no doubt estimate how critical was the position in Egypt at that time. The Palestine-bound trains were crammed; the Sudan Agency besieged for visas; at G.H.Q. the air was filled with the smoke of burning documents—Ash Wednesday they called it; the Egyptians, with Nahas Pasha and all his family dining unalarmed at the Continental, remained remarkably calm. At Army H.Q., which I visited frequently during that time, the “Ops” people showed an unshaken confidence; one day they were preparing to move to Daba the following morning from their position south of ’Amiriya on the Cairo road.
From ’Alamein we moved on to the sea shore outside Alexandria, waited there for a week hoping that we need go back no farther and then moved to the Faiyum. Here on a bare ridge near Kom Aushim, where the Mena road enters the cultivation, we spent the rest of the summer of 1942.
It was hot and the sand blew and we had little cover, but on the whole it was a suitable spot. To have gone to Cairo or to Mena would have been a great mistake. There there were thousands of other troops, black-outs, inspections by Area staffs and endless nuisances. And strategically the Faiyum was a convenient place, for now having lost the good base at Siwa we had to find another back door to the country behind the Axis lines.
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