by Hall, Ian
“Thanks for the help,” I nodded, “I appreciate it.”
“Bugger off, and don’t be such a poof.”
That’s Australians for you.
For the first hundred miles or so, we seemed to be following a road of some sorts, but before darkness fell completely, I couldn’t see one part of it left. Soon we were climbing sand dunes and dropping out of sight repeatedly. I had no idea how the drivers kept our little convoy together. When we stopped to get our bearings, I found the stars gave more light than I’d ever seen before.
“The sand seems to shine,” I said, looking around.
“It’s a phosphorescent glow,” Bagnold informed me as he found certain stars, and took readings from a sextant of some kind. With a map spread over the bonnet of his truck, and the aid of a dim torch, he made a few notes, we ate a sandwich, and we were back on our way.
Morning seemed to take a week to arrive, and we drove onwards until just after ten o’clock. Then, in a dip in the sand, we set up what the men called ‘camp’. Basically they staked out small sheets tied to the trucks to shade from the sun, and promptly fell asleep.
I couldn’t. I winced as one ridiculously horrendous insect after another found me, most with pincers the size of my hand, and spent most of the morning either shooing them away, killing them, or being bitten by them.
I’d been in the desert for less than a day, and I already hated it.
And we travelled this way for the next five days, heading for a place called Al-Faraj.
We drove with one eye on the road ahead, and one in the sky, looking for our greatest danger, the Luftwaffe. When we spotted a plane, we halted, and sat still until it disappeared over the horizon; a standing target offering less chance of discovery. Those long minutes as the LRDG readied themselves behind their nasty-looking machine guns were the longest of my life.
We got buzzed just once on the way west. I ran like blazes away from the trucks, and threw myself to the ground as bullets burst into the sand all around. The Messerschmitt ME-109 came back twice more, but when I returned to the convoy, he hadn’t been that accurate with his fire; two bullet holes to mark his passage. We drove on minutes later, the incident long forgotten, replaced by the more urgent problems of an aching backside and a parched throat.
When we arrived at Al-Faraj, I must admit to being a whole bundle underwhelmed; if I’d expected something, it was buildings of some kind, perhaps what I called civilization.
What we’d travelled to was no more than a collection of palm trees circling a small dirty pond, three dark tents, and a bunch of suspicious bearded men who carried long antique rifles.
To my surprise, Bagnold virtually jumped off his jeep to greet them. When they recognized him, their faces split into huge toothy grins. He then disappeared into one of their tents. ‘To have a smoke’, Mike said but didn’t explain further.
I jumped to the sand to stretch my legs and try to rustle up some feeling in my backside, now virtually numb from the punishing buffeting.
While Mike parked our jeep under the palm trees, I got closer to these bearded toothy men. The looks they gave me were quite feral, and I gathered they had no great love for their German conquerors.
When Bagnold returned, he announced that the lines to the north had moved in our week of travel, another German push, and we were now firmly behind enemy lines.
The terrain had changed too; rock ridges and ravines replaced the ever-present sand dunes, and we now made better time, Bagnold obviously knowing the route well.
Our first sign of the war was a burnt out Chevrolet jeep. It looked like it had been there for thirty years, but Herbie convinced me it was more like three months.
A day later, we slowed our progress, now concealing ourselves much more carefully during the day, camouflage netting above the jeeps, patrols out in all directions.
It was on one of these that we spotted our first German.
From a ridge, looking into the next valley, the halftrack was driving slowly east.
“Three men inside,” Herbie said, his eyes never leaving his binocular lenses. “Two up front.” He looked back over their route. “They’ll have cover of some kind, you don’t travel alone in the desert.”
I’d seen the kind of vehicle in Edinburgh, their uncaring tracks tearing up the city’s asphalt, but to see it in the desert was way different.
“Is it our way in?” I asked. I had no idea if we could even get into the next valley, never mind stage an ambush.
“Maybe.” He shuffled down the ridge, lying on his back. “Depends if they take the next right or left.”
They turned left, away from us.
Half an hour later, we stood around Bagnold’s truck, looking at a map on the bonnet and listening to his plan.
“It might mean they’re either heading to Jaifa-Wadi or they’re looking for something… probably us.” He pointed to the road north. “Either way, they’ll stop at Jaifa; they have to, it’s the last water for a hundred miles. That’s where we hit them.”
That night, we followed the tracks, and parked two miles short of the watering hole. An hour later we found both the halftrack and a small radio armored car, sitting at the line of palm trees. A lone guard stood, leaning back on the halftrack’s rear, smoking a cigarette.
Bagnold had broken the scouting group into two. I stood with Berti, Herbie, and two LRDG’s. “We let Baggie make the first move.” One said. I had neither the inclination or need to object.
From our position I saw Berti walking slowly forward. For a while it seemed like he’d walk right into the German sentry, then at last he was challenged. I saw them exchange words, and the guard’s rifle lowered. A second German advanced on the pair from the radio car; an officer. They were so enmeshed in Berti’s conversation, they didn’t see Bagnold’s group approach. The Germans spoke for a minute or so before two dark figures engulfed them. I heard two almost inaudible clicks, and they fell to the ground.
We were waved forward.
By the time we got to the wadi, the Germans were all lying in a line, all dead, all accounted for.
Even in the low light from the stars, Bagnold looked rather pleased with himself. “Take whatever equipment you need from the bodies, it looks like we have your transport in.”
Getting In, Getting Out Alive
The German ‘base’ near Tazirbu was at the most southerly extent of German influence in Libya, although it could not be called a ‘base’ by any standards I could see. There did not seem to be much of an organized defensive perimeter, and on the whole it was hardly a mass of activity. Anyone not on direct duty were inside tents. Berti drove our halftrack into the scattered camp unchallenged, virtually unnoticed.
When I asked a passing Lieutenant the position of the command center, he waved in a northerly direction, and walked away, unheeding of my superior rank. I ignored the slight, and we drove further into the ‘base’.
Only when we made further enquiries did we find the absence of any higher echelons of command. In general, we found the men were either battle-tired or lethargic, neither of which we expected.
We set up our tents where we liked, and waited on nightfall.
Only when the sun had set did we witness any life in the camp.
The officer’s mess was little different from the main body in attitude. With Siggy in tow, I made conversation with many of the Germans, but found them having little liking for either their position or their placement in the theater. Their hatred of the Italians surprised me, and I found myself agreeing with everything they said. Their supposed allies were indolent, stupid, and didn’t fight well.
The German High Command were held in some esteem, but being three hundred miles into the desert, most of the men had no idea what strategic value they added to the war to the north.
On our second day, we received the information we needed. In two days’ time, General Ludwig Crüwell would be arriving. We’d reached our goal just in time.
Considering there would be a
German High Command dignitary arriving soon, we saw little preparation made; the defenses were not improved, there was no last minute inspection. We sat in our tent, expecting at every minute to be roused, questioned, but we were overlooked, like most of the rest of the base.
The two days, however, had given us the reason for the camp’s detached atmosphere. The men in Tazirbu were the remnants of the German 10th Army, beaten in the Ukraine by a Russian counter-attack, then beaten again in the desert near Tobruk; they were the survivors of three months of fighting, sent down to the fringe of the line to recoup, relax.
We laid low until the general arrived, although the event was hardly a bustle of excitement. A transport landed in a stretch of cleared ground to the north, and with no fanfare or parade, he simply stepped off the plane.
Looking every one of his fifty years, the thin man even reminded me of photographs of Rommel. He wore a simple Afrika Korps cap, and seemed very much at ease with the muted welcome.
When he was driven to a new tent set-up, on the south-western edge of the camp, I couldn’t have been happier. I knew that soon men from the LRDG would be in position, observing both the general and ourselves.
The approach was a simple one, we had information for the general’s ears only, we needed a private audience. I had crude maps, drawn by Bagnold himself, giving false positions of British units on their southern flank. I had photographs of tank divisions, although their position had been way different from our tale to the general.
We waited for the end of the official dinner, and presented ourselves at the general’s tent, our evidence in a slim brown briefcase.
“Captain Philps, Intelligence.” I said to the guard. “We need to see the General. It is of the utmost importance.”
We waited until our request was taken inside.
“The General will give you two minutes.”
As simple as that.
Once inside, it was simple to mention the secrecy of the information, and the inside aide was asked to leave. Berti, as an NCO, followed him out.
I heard a soft cry as Siggy enveloped the general in his large arms. “We have a mission for you, sir.” I said in case anyone was listening from outside. And I blethered for a good minute on the ‘General’s Mission’ while the general’s body succumbed to the pressure on his windpipe.
Slitting the back of the tent with a sharp knife, we carried his inert body to our waiting halftrack, and packed him inside.
Astonished at our good luck, I looked around for any signs we’d been discovered. We’d chatted about various schemes if our mission had gone tits up; anything from a knife in the ribs to poison slipped into his food. We’d needed nothing of it.
We didn’t even get inspected as we left the camp.
We hadn’t gotten a mile before two figures rose from the sand, hands up, halting our progress.
Two jeeps raced towards us, and once we’d transferred the unconscious General Ludwig Crüwell, we all jumped aboard. I could hardly believe it was all over so easily.
Suddenly the night sky behind us was ripped apart. Our LRDG diversion had arrived; huge explosions of oil and fuel, sending large red flamed clouds high into the sky. I grinned as my backside was buffeted; our escape was well and truly on.
With the alarms going off all over camp, General Crüwell would be discovered missing, the guard unconscious. I expected a full-on chase.
What I got was our two jeeps joining the other two, then travelling over rocky terrain for a good hour or so, hopefully leaving no tracks.
Then, as the sun rose to our left, we set off at high speed along a line of dunes putting as much distance between us and our likely pursuers as possible.
Past ten o’clock, our usual doss-down time, we continued at breakneck speed. It was only at noon when we noticed the small spotter plane.
“A Storch,” I shouted, eyes buffeted from my binocular lenses. “Reconnaissance.”
Howie nodded. “They’ll be radioing our position. If it turns back before the cavalry arrive, we should try and hide.”
True to his prediction, the minute the spotter plane turned tail, Bagnold turned off the road, heading for a rocky ridge to the south.
To my amazement, we made it.
Once the jeeps had stopped, we broke into a frenzy of pulling camouflage nets from their tied-down positions on the trucks, and staking them down, lessening the angular shapes and trying to hide any shadows, the biggest give-away to anyone looking down from above.
Bagnold inspected every jeep, adjusting, his eyes never long from looking up into the deep blue sky.
“What I would give for a Scottish sky full of clouds.” I said as he closed on our jeep.
“That would be a luxury…” then he stopped. “Everybody keep still!” He roared.
I turned my head to see what he was looking at. A tiny black dot, high in the sky. We watched it for five minutes, then it seemed to stop.
“He’s coming down for a look.” Bagnold said running off under the nets, spreading the word. “All Jerry uniforms get outside the netting, get yourselves noticed!”
“Won’t he be able to tell we’re British from our jeeps?”
Herbie shook his head, climbing into the back of ours, cocking the large Vickers Maxim. “The nets break the shapes, he won’t have a clue what’s down here.”
The airplane took ages to reach us, then he buzzed so low, I could see the dirty oil leaking from his yellow painted engine manifold. I waved, hopefully convincingly, but he buzzed us two more times. I waited each approach for the flash of his machine guns, but he never fired.
“That means either he’s satisfied we’re German, or we’ve been rumbled.” I said to myself, knowing the pilot had deliberately held his fire for fear of hitting the general. I didn’t have much time to wonder what happened next.
As the plane came down for another run, Bagnold ordered our men to fire. All eight large caliber guns opened up, making the pilot dodge up early.
Bagnold began to rouse us. “Anyone not on guns, get the camo nets stowed away!”
We were suddenly on the run, and God knows what was after us.
As we tied the protesting General to the second jeep’s seats, I caught a drift of Bagnold’s reasoning. “…out on our own. They’ll follow, but they won’t catch up. They’ll drop troops ahead of us, so we’ll have to do some creative driving to get past them.”
“How do we get through, sir?” the nearest man asked. His hands were on the Vickers, his eyes never left the trailing plane.
“We outflank them,” Bagnold said with determination. “I don’t care if we have to drive to the jungle to do it.”
When it became obvious the fighter wasn’t going to return, we drove off. All day we watched the skies. Every single second of that day we had company; one, sometimes two airplanes keeping tabs on us.
“This doesn’t bode well.” Herbie disclosed as we neared dusk.
“How?”
“Jerry knows where we are.” His grim expression made me nervous. “But when night falls, we can drive two hundred miles, maybe three. That’s a lot of distance to catch up.”
“So we keep ahead of Jerry each night.” I thought my reasoning was flawless. “Cat and mouse.”
Herbie made a wry smile look like a painful grimace. “Except Jerry right now is probably dropping paratroopers ahead of us.”
I nodded. That would make the whole mouse-run thing more treacherous.
“He’s going to split us up.” Herbie announced.
“Who is?”
“Baggie.”
And I had no answer. Splitting up the force gave the Germans more tails to chase, but it also made us less of an attacking force if we did get caught.
Sure enough, true to Herbie’s prediction, Bagnold split the force at dusk, sending two trucks on the obvious route, back to Al-Faraj. I watched them depart, wondering if they were on a suicide mission, a diversion to allow us to get back to the British lines. I could only imagine the fuss we�
��d caused in the German High Command; we’d taken one of their own from right under their noses. We had to pay for our crime.
Watching the dim red lights from Bagnold’s truck, we drove roughly south.
We’d re-arranged the personal before dividing the jeeps. Berti now sat in the back with me, Herbie up front, co-driver. Bagnold, Siggy, two LRDG’s, and General Crüwell sat in the lead jeep.
On the next day, we were exhausted from our 36 hour flight from the German camp, and we parked for the day, sleeping in four hour staggers. That evening, we got buzzed by a Messerschmitt 109.
Damn.
The next day was more of the same. We raced, we zig-zagged through the rocky passes, but by evening we got discovered once more.
Bagnold gathered us all together again, a map spread on his truck’s bonnet.
“I’m splitting us up again.”
I could hardly believe it. “Why?”
“Because Jerry knows exactly where we are, and we have to divert him a bit.”
“Who’ll take the General?” I asked.
“You will. I’ll take number one jeep and head east, I’ll leave you with Mike. We’ll leave a nice ruse for Jerry to see, and most of the fuel and water.” He pointed to the map, located Al-Faraj, and then pointed to a point, a good few hundred miles to the south. “This is El-Yima and is the last watering hole before entering the white-pages.”
“White-pages?”
Mike laughed. “We call it that because there’s nothing on the map except white.”
Bagnold joined the laugh, although he looked nervous. “The borderlands between Libya, Egypt and Sudan are featureless. After El-Yima, you make for the Nile, they can’t follow you that far, their planes don’t have the range.”
I could see the logic, but I couldn’t see us driving half-way across North Africa. “And what will you do?”
