This was one of those events which remained a lurking horror all through the existence of L.R.D.G. Bad casualties behind the enemy’s lines, hundreds of miles from proper medical treatment, were just one of the risks which had to be taken. Fortunately they did not happen very often though in November, 1941, Simpson of S1 patrol travelled 700 miles from Buerat el Hsun to Kufra with a severe wound in the shoulder and Murray had much the same sort of journey from Fuka to the Faiyum in July, 1942.
The medical organisation of L.R.D.G. consisted of an M.O. at Group H.Q. and a medical orderly with each patrol. Accommodation for sick varied from place to place, from quite a good hospital at Kufra to the lee side of a palm tree for a case of pleurisy when we spent a week waiting at Ghetmir outside Jalo in January, 1942. Some of the orderlies were of the R.A.M.C., others willing learners taught by the M.O. They worked under difficulties for it is not easy to treat a patient who is moving a hundred miles a day in a bumping truck. But they were resourceful and did not lack the power to improvise : the use of a grease gun for an enema might find a place in the pages of the Lancet!
The Doctor too had to be ready to improvise. To Siwa one night there came a message from Olivey who was taking two Libyan Arab Force men to the outskirts of Agedabia whence they would walk into the town to learn the strength of the enemy garrison. “Arab corporal” signalled Olivey, “has temp. 100 pulse 90 symptoms appendicitis from 1400 hours advise treatment.” I took this to Lawson and we answered “Keep in semisitting position knees slightly raised small drinks of water or weak tea with sugar only water bottle filled hot water to right side no repeat no aperient Dovers for pain morphia if bad if condition deteriorates send Jaghbub in two trucks.” Whatever was wrong with the corporal Dick Lawson’s radio-therapy was successful. He was better next day and Olivey went on to do the job.
Timpson, like Tinker, also ran into trouble and his success in maintaining the road watch in spite of all the difficulties he encountered was one of the outstanding achievements of L.R.D.G.
He had left Kufra on November 20th. Five days later, in the Marada-Zella gap, he met an enemy patrol of double his own strength and with vehicles which included armoured cars. As his orders were to keep the watch going at all costs Timpson wished to avoid a scrap but the Italians knew their ground well and manoeuvred skilfully, forcing him to fight. For an hour or more the skirmish continued, with Timpson making every effort to disengage himself and the enemy moving to block his escape. In the end he extricated three cars of his original seven; the rest of the patrol, as we heard later, was captured and taken into Zella.
Timpson had now lost more than half his force and much of his rations; he had not enough petrol to get back to Kufra; the weather was foul with cloud and rain making navigation most difficult, but none of this deterred him and three days later he was nearing the coast road west of the Marble Arch. On November 30th he had got the watch going, on a hilltop four hundred yards from the road.
The whole area was rapidly filling up with Axis troops, the rear units of Rommel’s front at ‘Agheila, and it was impossible to follow the usual plan of camping in a wadi a mile or two south of the road. So Timpson placed his camp twenty miles inland and every evening at dusk the Jeep brought up the relieving watchers, dropped them a mile or two from the road and waited to pick up the outgoing pair who left the road at midnight, guided to the car by the flashing of a torch and the occasional running of the engine.
Coming up to the rendezvous one evening a figure appeared over a ridge and ran towards the car, shouting and gesticulating. Timpson halted, but as the man drew near realised that he was an Italian officer, apparently lost and seeking a lift, so started the Jeep and moved slowly away, calling out advice in German to the Italian who pursued him, roaring angrily, till he was too exhausted to go on.
Thus they carried on till December 10th when the Jeep failed to pick up the two watchers coming off duty who were never seen again. All next day a search was made for them but they had probably walked in the dark into the midst of an enemy camp and been captured.
The 13th was the last and most hazardous day of all. Of it Timpson wrote afterwards :
“December 13th. Road watch from Wadi Ahmed. (This was, as far as we knew, the one possible point in the vicinity unoccupied by enemy camps.) Position in thorn bush 200 yards from the road. Starting at dawn enemy formed camp all around us., except between our position and the road, though there was another camp on the far side. They were well disciplined and quite cheerful though a bit rattled when a British night fighter strafed the area by moonlight at 8 p.m. They apparently fed well : macaroni and goulash for lunch!
“I decided to leave at 8.15 p.m. in order to stop the next party, if possible, from coming to the same area, which I knew was their intention. The moon was up but it was raining. I think the enemy must have spotted us getting out of the bush, but they did not challenge until we were passing some vehicles as we walked up the wadi, which was shallow and open near the road. After their sentry had shouted ‘Passorio’ twice and I had replied with an ineffective ‘Freund’ he fired one shot. We walked on slowly : he fired twice more and we walked a bit faster. Then he started firing hard and was joined by others and the chase began, with a number of them after us, running and shooting. We were much hampered by our heavy coats and kit.
“However, we finally eluded them though Welsh and I got separated. We both lay low while they searched all around. I could see their figures silhouetted against the sky as they hunted for us, but after half an hour they gave it up and I heard the leader of the first search party say to the second party, which had come up later,’ I think they were only food thieves.’
“I passed close by another camp, then went back to the wadi at a point where we had first joined it the previous night and waited for Welsh for three-quarters of an hour, calling him by name, for I had the compass. Then after failing to find him I made my way to the Jeep. The relief party had heard the shooting and luckily had not gone down to the road, but awaited my return.
“Welsh, after waiting for me in the wadi for an hour, went on, thinking I had been hit when they opened up with an automatic, for I had stumbled and fallen twice in the deep water of the wadi. After that he had many adventures, walking into four camps and being shot at in three of them and getting away with much courage and resourcefulness. He reached the R.V. at 4 a.m., but after three hours of giving the usual signals I had decided to leave at 3 a.m. in order to tell the remainder of the patrol to move to join Indian 1 patrol” (who had been sent up from Kufra to help Timpson in his difficulties) “in case the enemy found Welsh or some of his kit and chased us the next day. At the same time I had received a signal from H.Q. saying that Lazarus with S1 patrol had already established their road watch” (west of Buerat el Hsun) “and I felt justified in suspending my watch, at least temporarily, till Welsh was found.
“December 14th.—I returned to the R.V. in the Jeep at dawn and finally found Welsh. He had actually walked to within two miles of our camp, twenty miles from the R.V., after a very strenuous night. For this reason I took some time to find him as I searched the R.V. area first, finally picking up his footmarks which showed clearly after a rainy night. He had hurried back fast to warn the camp of what had happened, for he thought the enemy had got me, and was much concerned in trying to remember the figures of the vehicles we had counted the previous day.”
Tinker was out of the running and Timpson in difficulties, but the watch must go on. So Lazarus with Si set out from Kufra but before he had gone far Rommel’s intention to abandon the ’Agheila position was beyond doubt and it would therefore be just as useful if the watch was kept much farther west. So Lazarus went west through Henry’s Gap, north past Fogha and for the first time in L.R.D.G. history across the terrible basalt country of the Harug, over the Hon-Zella road, south of Bu Ngem and finally to the coast road north of Gheddahia. This was a good effort. Lazarus was 800 miles from his base; he knew he must rely on us to send out petrol to him befo
re he could get home, and he was right in the enemy’s line of retreat. In his own bald report :
“The watch began 17.00 hours 13 December. During the evening of 14 December a section of S.A.S. shot up the road and camps in the near vicinity of the road watch.” (We could never persuade Middle East that “beat ups” by David Stirling’s chaps and a careful traffic census by us were incompatible.) “The watch on day 15/16 was made at RS2910. The country here is very open with little cover and convoys were frequently pulling off the road so this place was not used again. The Wadi Gheddas was cultivated for the greater part of its length and there were many Arabs about who frequently approached the watchers. Money, tea and sugar ensured friendly relations. The activity of S.A.S. along the road brought out many enemy aircraft which carried out intensive searches for four days along the Wadi Zerzer and the country surrounding our forward base.”
But the watch must go on. So Tinker left Kufra again. On the 20th December he took over from Lazarus and that was the last we heard of him for a week until on the 28th came a signal from a troop of the Heavy Section at Tagrifet : “Tinker met here with four trucks. Have given him enough petrol to reach Zella.”
This was the story of the week.
Having made a rear base thirty miles south-west of Gheddahia, Tinker went north with nine men to take over from Lazarus. They met and Lazarus started home. But by this time the area was filling up; enemy camps were being formed all along the road and also some miles to the south of it and a new watch site had to be found. While they were preparing to do this Tinker’s party was discovered. They were hidden in a small tributary to the main wadi when a German armoured car patrol crossed their fresh tracks.
The Huns started to beat the wadi as one beats a copse for rabbits, firing into the bushes and throwing grenades among the rocks. Our men, outnumbered and out-gunned, left their two trucks, buried their ciphers and hid as best they could in caves and bushes. The Germans soon found the trucks and camped to await the patrol’s return.
At midday another truck arrived with a load of Arabs and the New Zealanders heard the sounds of questioning followed by heavy beating. Then the Arabs were set to search the wadi. One of them passed so close to White, crouching in a bush of desert broom, that he must have seen him but gave no sign.
At dusk four of the patrol managed to get away and started to walk back to their base camp. Tinker, one of the four, stopped at some Arab tents for a drink. Hardly had he finished when a car drove up and while Tinker hid behind the tent the Germans questioned the Arabs who denied all knowledge of any “Inglizi” till the Germans drove away.
By dawn all four men were back at the rear base, arriving shortly before another enemy armoured car patrol which had been back-tracking them. The New Zealanders got away with their vehicles just in time. Thus Tinker rejoined us at Zella with six men missing, but we did not despair of seeing them again, for so often in L.R.D.G. history men had “walked out” and turned up days or weeks later.
And so it happened this time. What happened to four of the six I do not know, but two of them, Ellis and Sturrock, lay up all day and that night walked back to the base to find Tinker gone. During the night they separated in a search for water and did not meet again. At dawn Ellis, who told me this story, found himself in a position not new to L.R.D.G. men—five hundred miles from nowhere, with no food, no water and only the clothes he wore. But he knew that Rommel was retreating and that if he went due east there was a chance of being picked up, so for four days he walked eastwards, resting by day and moving by night when the cold made sleep impossible. Once he got water from some Arabs. On the fifth day he reached the Bu Ngem road, arriving into the middle of an action between German armoured cars and our own. This was soon over and the two German cars burning fiercely and Ellis walked over to an advanced patrol of the K.D.G.s. In a week he was back in Zella and a few days later Sturrock, after much the same experiences, turned up there too.
That was the end of the road watch for Middle East then signalled that we need not go on with it. Considering all things it was perhaps the most useful job L.R.D.G. ever did.
I wish Rommel could have read this chapter.
1 See page 152.
2 See Chapter 9.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
’ALAMEIN TO GABES
ON THE last day of August Rommel attacked at ’Alamein.
Axis hopes were high. Alexandria was only sixty miles away; Mussolini had come over from Italy and Libya was being combed for a white Arab stallion on which he would make his triumphal entry into Cairo; high officials of the new government for Egypt had been selected and Egyptian money printed; Italian-Arabic phrase-books were selling well.
By September 3rd the offensive was over, broken up by the guns of the Eighth Army and the bombs of the R.A.F. The threat to Egypt had been removed and it was clear that the next move would be with Montgomery and that when that move came the Faiyum would be no place for L.R.D.G. For us, working on the southern flank of the Army when its advance started, Kufra was the proper base and by mid-October the whole unit was there. Then came the question of what part L.R.D.G. was to play in the coming offensive.
In the last six months Stirling’s S.A.S. force had changed its character. From the small band of fifty odd experts in aircraft destruction with whom we had worked in the previous winter it had grown into a much larger force with its own transport, navigators and signals. With his heavily armed Jeeps and 3-tonners to supply them, Stirling no longer relied on us for transport across the desert; the S.A.S. had become a sort of L.R.D.G. of their own. So it was decided to divide the desert between us, L.R.D.G. taking the western part of the country and leaving to the parashots the shorter range work to the east. Kufra was also the obvious base for them since with the Qattara passes, Siwa and Jaghbub in enemy hands and with the great barrier of the Sand Sea to the south of them, the next best line of approach to the coast was by Steele’s route to Qaret Khod.
A year before this Lazarus with his Survey Section had been mapping the country between the two sand seas and at the end of one of the dune ranges which run southwards and peter out in the serir he had built a cairn for an astro-fix position—Howard’s Cairn they called it (Howard was Lazarus’s driver)—and it was a much-used rendezvous in the next fifteen months.
Here in October and November Mayne lived with his para-shot squadron, an existence which reminded one of Morgan or Kidd and the pirates of the seventeenth century, secure in the palm-fringed creek of some West Indian island, thrusting forth to raid the fleets of Spain. From Kufra their 3-tonners brought them supplies and water, for the nearest water was at Siwa, then in Italian hands. And from Howard’s Cairn small parties of three or four Jeeps crossed the Sand Sea to the gravel desert beyond Jaghbub to attack the railway line which the Axis had put into use from Tobruk to Dab a and other targets along the coast road.
Stories of their operations used to reach us at Kufra with the L.R.D.G. patrols which were using the Howard’s Cairn route at the same time. Tales of trains mined, railway stations wrecked, road traffic shot up and aircraft burned on their landing grounds. Tales of Jeep patrols pushing out to the extremity of their petrol range and attacking the enemy from the back side of their line at ’Alamein; of someone (Scratchley, I think) taken prisoner there when the Axis line broke in October by an unbelieving British unit who scoffed at his story of having come from Kufra to Himeimat.
There was an echo of Moore’s march and of the walk of the T2 men from Nofilia after one raid on the railway south of Sidi Barrani. The parashots had shot up the station staff and wrecked the buildings but when they withdrew and halted to collect their party one man, Sillitoe the navigator, was missing. When he had not come in by dawn they assumed he had been killed or taken prisoner and turned south to Howard’s Cairn.
At daybreak Sillitoe found himself a mile or two from the railway, without food or water and with the alternative of going back to the station to surrender or of walking “home.” With great courage he c
hose the second, and started southwards. Mayne’s base was 250 miles away, but his patrols, after crossing the Sand Sea, used occasionally to lie up for a day or two in the scrub at Hatiet Etla, an old dumping ground of ours where we once kept a stock of food and water and where Lloyd Owen had hidden with Haselden before the September attack on Tobruk. Sillitoe guessed that here he might find some remains of food and water and set off on his 150-mile walk. In the end he reached Etla and by good fortune on the same day that another parashot party passed through.
In October and November L.R.D.G. patrols were going up to the Gebel Akhdar from Kufra with reliefs, food and other supplies for those various branches of Middle East who did their work inside Cyrenaica and whose names were carefully designed to mean nothing at all. Sweeting, returning from one of these expeditions in October, brought with him Guignol and also an L.R.D.G. survivor of the Barce raid. Guignol’s job was the collection of escaped prisoners, baled-out airmen and others who found themselves stranded in enemy territory, and for this purpose he had organised a series of “cells” of friendly Arabs throughout the Gebel who collected any British they heard of, fed and sheltered them, and brought them back to his base to wait for an L.R.D.G. patrol and a passage back to Kufra or Siwa.
The survivor was Findlay of the Guards Patrol who had been with Dennis in the attack on the barracks at Barce on the night of September 13th. In the confusion of their withdrawal his truck had become separated from the rest, missed the road out of the town to the east, and at dawn was being chased across the plain towards the escarpment by a band of Italians. Off the road no car can scale that scarp so the crew set fire to their truck and vanished into the undergrowth with the Italians at their heels. By nightfall the hunt had died down and the next day Findlay, separated in the darkness from his companions, walked southwards and was guided by an Arab to Guignol’s base.
Long Range Desert Group Page 23
