Little by little we laid by a store of provisions, chocolate, milk, sugar, tins of fruit, beer, even spirits and wines. The sergeant installed a big drum on the inside of the gharry and by fitting it with a homemade tap, made a handy extra water cistern. We collected from the desert as many ‘jerry cans’ as we could find (these were German petrol tins, strong and excellently made) and then we saved water from our daily ration till both cistern and cans were full. After we had laid in a stock of cigarettes and supplemented food reserves with tins of dried fruit and dehydrated potatoes, also – the goddess Hygeia pardon us – salvaged from the desert, we fitted more lights inside the gharry and rehearsed packing till we felt competent to move at a minute’s notice.
We had not long to wait. On 6 October, Nature provided us with an unexpected luxury. For many nights we had been given the promise of a storm. Far away to the north, over the distant Mediterranean, we could see big clouds massing, white and grey, and the lightning playing fantastically behind them. At first it was so distant that no sound came from those far flickerings; but after a while, the storm clouds moved in on us and opened over our heads. The desert stood still, then seemed to shiver beneath the unwonted shocks. The thunder filled us with strange emotions. Why did ‘the great gods … keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads?’ (Shakespeare, King Lear, 3, ii). Our first impulse was to run from the unexpected violence, but presently the feeling of primitive alarm passed. Stripping naked, we ran out into the rain, soaped our bodies, and let the shower wash us clean. Then we frisked and jumped into the warm air, letting the water trickle from head to foot.
That deluge did not only give us our best bath for months; aerial reconnaissance the next day disclosed that the enemy’s forward landing grounds, particularly El Daba, the Stuka base, were waterlogged by the heavy rains, while, the shower having missed Burg el Arab,17 our aircraft were still able to take off (Fig. 6). All available British craft were mustered, and made repeated and telling raids on the immobilized German planes and transport.
Finally on the night of 23 October, the army struck. Having been warned to look out for fireworks about half past nine that night, we climbed on the roof of the gharry: and precisely (or so it seemed to us) at 2140 hours, a single white searchlight stood up in the west, white and vertical, and the four hundred and fifty 25-pounders that had been concentrated in the six-mile long northern sector of the front opened up; and with them, the less heavily concentrated artillery on the whole of the forty-mile line.
Has any campaign opened more dramatically? The noise of it rolled in continuously upon us over the dunes, and ‘nimble sulphurous flashes’ (Shakespeare, Pericles, 3, i) raced along the horizon. It was a steady volume of monstrous and portentous sound, broken every now and then by the force of some enormous and extraordinary explosion. And above the ground flashes rose thousands of tracers in wavy hesitant lines, pinpricking the sky with red stars. Then at ten o’clock the barrage paused, and the infantry went in to attack.
The history of the battle is well known now. In nine days the British infantry pierced the Alamein Line and cleared a way for the tanks. In nine hours the tanks broke the best of Rommel’s armour at Tel Aqaqqir. When that was accomplished we were ordered to pack and move forward.
We did not know, that early morning when we began loading our tins and pans, that we were about to take part in one of the greatest advances in history. Our main emotions were excitement at the magnificent first success of the attack and at the prospect of seeing new territory, and regret at having to leave our homes. I left my bed, seats, pegs and curtains in my cell. I left too, my Gauguin reproduction and, as an afterthought, I wrote a little note, and stuck it above the picture, addressing it to whoever might come and live there after me:
‘I hope you’ll like staying here. May you have as much pleasure in this little pit as I have enjoyed.’
I wonder if anyone ever found that note. Probably not, because the desert hides and forgets quickly.
From Alamein to Gambut
We left Alam el Osmaili on the morning of 7 November (Fig. 6). From the first we realized that it was not an ordinary military advance that we were embarking upon. From the periphery of Hitler’s Empire we were moving in towards Germany, and beyond Germany lay home. It was possible that we might never return to Egypt, and therefore to us, our advance was a migration. War’s nomads, we were moving to new ground, and taking all our possessions with us. When we had first carefully packed our delicate instruments18 against the jolting which we knew would be inevitable, then stowed away all our stock of equipment and our recent acquisitions, the whole floor of the gharry was raised three feet: and with our piles of bedding and tins, buckets and desert tracks roped to the sides of the waggon, we resembled most of all those migrant families who, in the years of depression, moved from the Bad Lands of America in search of work, and our nickname became The Grapes of Wrath.19
On the main coast road leading west to Tobruk we found ourselves caught in a great stream of traffic (Fig. 6). No one who saw that stream will easily forget it. It was as if all the traffic in the Middle East had ponded up behind the Alamein Line, and where the Eighth Army had pierced the wall, was pouring through in an inexhaustible flow (Fig. 6). We had to drive very slowly, moving only at the speed of the stream, catching glimpses now and then of the Mediterranean, incomparably blue and still, bandying words in fragmentary conversations with the truck crews, and turning to look at the unvarying desert to the south, as flowerless as the sea and even more impassive. There was a great excitement in the air at the completeness of the first victory, and astonishment at the amount of transport mustered for the advance.
At El Alamein station20 we caught a quick view of the prisoners of war in their cages (Fig. 6). It was difficult to have any emotion but pity for them. They sat on the ground in dejected groups within the barbed wire compounds, patrolled by a handful of soldiers. No relief at being finished with warfare was visible on their faces. They seemed stunned and overthrown by the violence of the British attack and the sudden reversal of their fortunes. The barrage had battered and dazed them.
Beyond El Alamein the road was littered on both sides with almost unimaginable ruin – tanks, armoured cars, those German infantry carriers which looked as if they had been requisitioned from a fairground, trucks and waggons of every description, shattered gun carriages, old Italian gharries with high cabs and big solid rubber wheels, aircraft old and new, shells and shell cases – all overturned, broken and twisted, as if someone had scooped the derelict steel of an abandoned Rhondda and littered the sand with it (Plates 12 and 13). At one point six OR 42s21 were lined up by the roadside in trim order, but burnt to skeletons. Around these ruins were scattered a thousand smaller belongings. German newspapers – our first uncensored evidence of their thinkings – were clinging to the thorn bushes: nearby was a dump of abandoned clothing with strange trousers and shirts, boots, packets of coarse Italian cigarettes: and in another place the ground was white with the documents of a ransacked orderly room.
PLATE 12 Beyond El Alamein: the debris of war
PLATE 13 Abandoned German tank with the palm-tree-and-swastika emblem of the Afrikakorps
At the end of the first day we slept at El Daba, but by that time, the enemy was in retreat far beyond Fuka (Fig. 6). The next day therefore we continued westward – to Fuka, Galal, Sidi Haneish and on toward Matruh. At Maaten Bagush we came upon trees (Fig. 6), the first I had seen since the Delta, and as we drew near to Matruh, the desert seemed to waken and rise into low hills, reminding me of the hills of Durham and Yorkshire. Just so would those fells have looked if some unkind agency had stripped them of their turf. But of the enemy we saw nothing.
I looked forward to seeing Matruh. Before the war it was a coming seaside resort famous for the coolness and purity of its air. It boasted a hotel with bathrooms. Since the first Italian advance upon Egypt it had been a memorable name. In addition it had a venerable antiquity. In Roman times it possessed a sponge in
dustry, and it was there that Cleopatra, after her inglorious flight from the battle at Actium, waited for the defeated Anthony. Shakespearian editors placed her palace at Alexandria, but it is claimed that it was on the lagoons of Matruh that her barges plied, and the airs that were lovesick of the perfume of her sails were the winds of Matruh.
But an advancing army cannot stay to correct Shakespeare editors. To my disappointment, I saw little of the town and can recall little except the deep ultramarine of the open sea, the pale turquoise of those lagoons that may once have burned under the queen’s barges, roofless white houses, overturned wire defences and scattered rags and papers: as if to point my disappointment, the land beyond the town fell to flatness again and presented us a picture so intolerably drab and unrelieved, that it lay like a weight on the mind. A few miles beyond Charing Cross we turned and headed into this dreary wilderness (Fig. 6).
For the next few days, from here to Gambut we had no other road but an improvized desert track: and those few days were our first experience of what the Desert Rat means by the Blue.
Black Book: 10 November
Fourth day of travelling – sand gives way to stony ground as we climb slowly inland – following a battered track and a pipeline to where we are now – a wilderness of rocks – here at last we go operational.22 But not for long, I think.
It is difficult to picture the discomforts of such a journey. Sometimes we had to make our way over rocky country, hard land filmed over with a thin layer of sand and covered with sharp and chipped rocks and boulders. Over these our heavy waggon bumped and jerked shockingly. Sometimes Roy, who was sitting by me on the rear edge of the water tank, was thrown bodily in the air. I would see him in mid-air flying like an unpractised trapeze artist. Three of the others, Harry, Norman and Cookie lay stretched out in the forward half of the gharry, happily pillowed on folded tents and bedding and old car seats; but the rest of us fared badly. At a bad bump, everything – petrol tins, ladders, bowls and basins rose bodily from the floor of the waggon – and our bodies with them.
Yet the rocky desert was preferable to the sandy desert. There the big wheels of the heavy Crossley revolved deeply into the yielding sand and threw up clouds of pollen-like dust. Big billowing clouds drifted in on us, thickening the sunlight, settling on hands and face, being breathed into nostrils and making grit between the teeth. There was little to do but pull down the flaps, which we had fitted to the back of the gharry, tie a handkerchief around the nose and mouth, and suffer.
If the land was safe we travelled with no more than thirty or forty other gharries: but where there was a possibility of encountering resistance, as in the wide spaces south of Sidi Barrani (Fig. 6), we attached ourselves to bigger and better-armed groups. At one stage we joined an impressive convoy of more than a thousand vehicles of every description. Ten lanes of lorries with more than a hundred vehicles to each lane lined up on an empty plateau and drove off in order.
Life in this convoy was a strange detached experience. The long lanes of marshalled lorries drove from dawn to dusk from nowhere to nowhere, beginning, turning, pausing, slowing and stopping like a regiment of men. Hour after hour nothing was visible but the half-seen lanes of moving traffic, the dry and crushed camel thorn, white with the innumerable shells of the sand snails which had crawled into the twigs and died there, the patterned ruts made by the tyres and an occasional desert hare racing frenziedly to find a way out of this moving terror.
One day followed another without change. Before dawn we struck camp and made breakfast. By the time the bivvies were down and packed away, the tea was ready and the bacon fried. No one washed or shaved. It was said that the wells were poisoned; but had they even been pure, there was no time to find them and draw from them. So great was the haste that washing and shaving was forbidden until the convoy had finished its journey. After a hasty breakfast, eaten standing or sitting on odd tins or boxes, there was time only for a hasty glance at the still forlorn and empty landscape, beautiful in nothing save the fine, coloured sky. Then a thousand engines were started and the convoy moved on again.
Sometimes we drove all day without rest, and there was as little communication between lorry and lorry as there is between ship and ship in an ocean convoy; but more often we halted for tiffin at midday. Then there was always an ecstasy of haste to prepare and consume the maximum amount of food in the allotted time of twenty minutes. As soon as the lorry came to a stop, we jumped down throwing clouds of yellow dust from our clothes as we hit the ground. One drew water from the tank, another filled a cut-down petrol tin with sand, poured in petrol and threw in a match, and a third handed down the hard biscuits and the boxes of bully beef, cheese, margarine, sugar and milk that were always kept handy. If all went well a passable meal could be prepared before the signal to move again was given. The last act was to scramble aboard the moving gharry with one hand, the other clutching the mug of precious undrunk chai.23
There was no other halt until the sun was almost down. Just before last light we stopped and dispersed. Sometimes we put up bivvies; sometimes the ground was so stony that we all slept in the open air in a row on a big tarpaulin, like babies in a nursery. It was always a relief to finish the day’s travelling, to watch the hundreds of petrol fires flaming and flaring in the falling darkness, to poke the sand beneath the dixie until the flames licked all around it, to eat the hot meat and vegetables tipped from their tins into the pan and warmed through, to sit by the fire till some anonymous voice shouted ‘Put them bloody lights out’ – to watch them going out like candles, then to look up and see the stars that had been there unnoticed for the last half hour.
But the long evenings were very lonely. If we were fortunate, we tracked down by its sound a wireless set somewhere in the darkness, and listened, sitting around it wrapped in our overcoats; but more often we had nothing to do but to lie between our blankets for warmth, and talk of home and food and water, nostalgic for a place where one need never be hungry, thirsty and dirty. Then Sid and Cookie would joke softly together, the corporal pull the blankets so high over his ginger head that his big boots (he rarely took them off) stuck out at the bottom, and Roy, half asleep, would turn over sighing, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear!’ By nine we were usually all asleep.
Gambut and Tobruk
Travelling like this we drove through a gap in the big barbed wire barricade which the Italians had built to keep rebel Senussi from escaping into Egypt (Plate 14).
Black Book: 12 November 1942
A long day of travel – from before dawn till almost dark – we reached Sidi Aseiz – a landing ground south of Bardia (Fig. 6). There also we went operational, but only for a few hours. We slept this evening on the tarpaulin again at Sidi Aseiz. On this day crossed border into Libya.
PLATE 14 A view from the tailgate of Unit 606’s gharry: the pursuing convoy crosses the wire-line marking ‘the entry into Libya, November 1942’
On 13 November we arrived at Gambut (Fig. 6).
Black Book
Water here, as everywhere else, was poisoned.
Gambut consisted of two sets of blockhouses, set on a rocky bluff overlooking a plain and divided by a little defile. There were at least two landing grounds there,24 one on the bluff and one below it, and both were thick with wreckage. It seemed as if the sand had not had time to overdrift the detritus of one campaign before a new deposit of ruin had been left behind.
It was evident that the Axis forces had retreated quickly and recently from Gambut; what they had been compelled to abandon became our legitimate prize. It was here that we began to furnish our little unit with long-needed conveniences. We found on the landing grounds camp beds, blankets, pillows, maps, tables, chairs, brushes, flit sprays, toolkits, even a big box full of German valves, and a rubber dinghy. Most of these were of great use to us. An extra blanket (although the German blankets were smaller and thinner than ours) was a great comfort when we later came to higher ground: the tables and chairs were the first we had possessed. We had to
wait until we came to Castel Benito to find the insecticide to go with the sprays, and Sirte before we could use the dinghy; but most of the treasure trove was immediately useful. Even abandoned enemy ammunition boxes (excellent wooden cases, lined with aluminium or zinc foil, solid and airtight with rubber sealing bands) were taken for food chests. From Gambut to Tunisia the cases that Munich workers had so carefully designed to hold cartridges and patrol lights, served to keep our biscuits, sugar, tea and cheese in good condition.
After collecting as much impedimenta as was useful and interesting, we commandeered one of the blockhouses, swept out a few rooms and installed our new-found beds and chairs. All the rooms were solidly walled with cement floors, and some still had a door. The walls were decorated with drawings of glamour girls (there was one mural of a well-proportioned WAAF wearing only a service hat, and drawn with a realism that would have outraged any Royal Academician) and the spaces that were not filled with sketches were scribbled over. In one room there was a long doggerel poem in praise of the RAF and in another, a flippant and optimistic comment by some British soldier or airman, which read something like this: ‘Keep this room clean, Fritz. We’ll come back.’ This taste for covering blank walls with sketches of seductive ladies was not confined to the British. Rommel’s room at El Daba had its murals, and the walls of the barracks at Castel Benito were adorned with sketches of seductive young ladies, African views and nostalgic views of Berlin.
The following morning, having received no orders to move, although it was obvious that the enemy was still in quick retreat, we prepared to enjoy one of the desert’s finest luxuries – a hot bath. It was only in smiling times that we could afford to take a bath at all: on a small unit like ours, equipped as we were with only one useless primus stove, fuel even for cooking was always a problem. In our Alamein days we had had to scavenge daily for wood, fetching in and burning old mine boxes, fuse boxes and even camel thorn. But here there was water in plenty and wood everywhere around us. We built big fires, boiled up the water from the pool in the defile in large canisters that lay abandoned on the site, and made baths out of the zinc foil boxes.
War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel during the Western Desert Campaign, 1942-3 Page 13
