War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel during the Western Desert Campaign, 1942-3

by Grice, Frederick

  You whose hands are rarely soiled and never dirty, who never know what it is to sit down to breakfast without washing, for whom to miss a regular bath is the top and summit of uncleanliness – you who have never been out of hearing of clean running water, will you ever understand the luxury of a desert bath? For a week we had been forbidden to use one drop of water in washing or shaving or cleaning teeth: for a week before that a cold wet cloth over hands and face had been all our ablutions. But here we bathed in hot water, and gallons of it. The pleasure of sousing off a fortnight’s dirt from hand, arm, knee, of sluicing the sand from out of the hair and between the toes, and of shaving off the black beard, and feeling chin and jowl smooth again – of putting on clean underwear, stockings and shirts – this was less a simple bath than a purification. When I wash now I often think of that bath of baths – of the vivid pleasure of it that daily use has now unfortunately staled (Plate 15).25

  After Gambut came Tobruk (Fig. 6) – a name that had come to stand for us as a symbol of first victory, of admirable resistance, of spectacular relief, and lastly, of untimely reversal. To me it was a memorable place, although my experience of it was not crossed with personal memories of victory or hardship. This was my first view of it – a little town taken for good and all, now the shattered ruin of a once trim port. Its environs were littered with wreckage and rubbish. Ransacked and half-burnt equipment stores spread their miscellaneous litter over the ground. The workshops were bombed and roofless. The ground was strewn with fragments of blasted and broken aeroplanes, gliders, motor transport and guns. The harbour was as thick with sunk or listed shipping as a broken well with stones. Yet not even this strewn and spread litter could detract entirely from the beauty of the bay and the little town on the promontory. Distance, hiding its scars, showed it still as a compact glistening little township, looking down on a calm and sheltered haven. But perhaps our admiration of it was heightened by the fact that this was the first town of any size that we had seen since Alex. Certainly the long breezy drive down the curling road from the hills was for us a consummation – an advance across the first desert from one land of towns to another.

  PLATE 15 AMES Unit 606. Named by Fred as follows: Cpl Jack Pryce, Harry Allen (H. Cookie) back row; Alec, Bob, Fred and Jimmy next-to-back row; Jack Scott (Cookie), Roy, Sarge (Nobby Clark) next-to-front row; Norman and Sid front row. ‘Taken at Gambut – one stage of the big offensive.’ Fred holds the flit spray, while Jimmy and Sid have rifles. Between Norman’s feet is the beautifully made German box for valves labelled Mechaniker.

  My recollections of Tobruk come back to me in fragmentary impressions – of Africans of the Pioneer Corps, released after a four-months imprisonment, wobbling on Italian bicycles or trying to walk home, thinking the war was over because they were free again: of frying bacon and tomatoes on the reedy road by the harbour: of the skeletal scaffoldings of Axis observation posts: of a squadron leader26 stopping to hitch an abandoned caravan to his Jeep and driving off with it: of gliders with broken wings: and of the long slow climbs from the silent town towards Gazala (Fig. 7).

  Black Book

  At Gazala – where everything was as quiet as a grave – we heard the usual late BBC news. ‘Fighting is going on around Gazala.’ Yet not a thing disturbed our tarpaulin slumbers – except the usual visitors – mosquitoes.

  15 November 1942

  Today – put up bivvies etc. at Gazala and watched our Kitties coming in to take over the drome (Table 2).27 But we learned that we may be pushing on even further before the day is out. Water is short, but adequate. Petrol plentiful – rations rotten. We are living on our emergency stuff. It’s cheese, bully, biscuits all day long. Left behind by Sector A – given instructions to move to a new site – packed and crossed the road to come within striking distance for the first time for me of the Med. I slept this night on the ground again in a bivvy and slept well. I hoped we might have stayed for a while at Gazala. The gharry was giving trouble, and we ought to have had mechanics to it. But no such luck.

  Gazala is to be remembered for three things. Firstly its mosquitoes, which made life out of cover after sundown a misery. Secondly, it was there that I – novice in Africa – first put foot in the Mediterranean. We were held up for a few days a mile or so from the sea, and nothing would satisfy me but to go and see it at close quarters. Sid, Roy and I walked down to the shore and came to a narrow steep shelving beach, broken into little forelands and masses of seaweed-covered rocks over which apple-green breakers smashed and withdrew furiously. It was an undistinguished corner of the great sea, a strip of whitish sand covered with pumice stone, little ball-like pincushions of brown sea-grass and long strands of diaphanous seaweed. But we have strange ambitions. To visit a place, though the visit brings little insight and little exaltation, is often enough for us. I was content to know that I had at last seen at close quarters the sea of the Phoenicians, the Crusaders and the Corsairs.

  Thirdly, we had another pleasant moment there. Walking away one dark night from a group of soldiers to whose wireless set we had been listening, we heard the sound of church bells. It was the bells of England ringing to celebrate ‘the end of the beginning’ – the victory of Alamein.

  Notes

  1 Head.

  2 The DID was a ration dump.

  3 Look.

  4 Inserts from the ‘Black Book’ are used here to amplify Fred’s account in his memoir, and are set in a smaller typeface to indicate their source.

  5 Lorry.

  6 Alam El Osmaili.

  7 A rocky watercourse, dry except in the rainy season.

  8 Erks were aircraftsmen, though the number in Unit 606 varied from time to time (see Appendix II).

  9 To drive the rotation of the antennae of the radar equipment.

  10 At Alam Halfa.

  11 As explained in the introduction, Unit 606 seems to have followed the same innovation as other North African units with Light Warning Sets. They used the gharry for their radar observations, thus saving on the hour it would have taken them to set up their instruments in a tent.

  12 As a radar operator.

  13 The Bofors and Lewis guns were to protect the landing grounds and AMES units from German and Italian air attack. Here they were clearly defending the troops at Alam el Osmaili.

  14 Part of the British Eighth Army in North Africa.

  15 Squadron Leader Young, formerly leader of 213 Squadron, but posted for other duties on 11 October 1942. He led AMES 606 and 607 on the ground for about two weeks after the Eighth Army’s breakout from El Alamein, 213 Squadron, ORB, AIR 27/1316, TNA, PRO.

  16 The Macchi fighter was manufactured by Macchi Aeronautica.

  17 RAF landing grounds clustered around Burg el Arab.

  18 Radar equipment.

  19 A novel by John Steinbeck.

  20 On the railway line leading across Egypt from east to west.

  21 OR 42s, enemy field guns.

  22 Setting up their radar scanning using 606’s lightweight set.

  23 Tea.

  24 Two main landing grounds and two satellites (Jefford, 2001)

  25 Further information about membership of Unit 606 is given in Appendix II.

  26 Squadron Leader Young, once more.

  27 260 Squadron, 112 Squadron, 250 Squadron and 450 Squadron, all flying Kittyhawks, reached the dromes or landing grounds at Gazala on 15 November, thus marking the end of the El Alamein campaign and the beginning of the Libyan assault.

  CHAPTER 5

  From the Green Mountain to the Gulf of Sirte

  Cyrenaica

  The day on which we left Gazala (Fig. 7) the weather broke and we drove along the coast road in heavy rain. Rain in the desert was a luxury and an inconvenience. The desert forces were not equipped to meet wet weather; we had not the clothes or the dwelling places to keep out the rain, or the transport to drive over sodden and boggy ground. This unexpected downpour gave us some uncomfortable moments; but a more important consequence was that it gave th
e retreating Axis forces breathing space to reassemble: and one commentator has said that this few days’ storm preserved Rommel’s armies from annihilation.

  However, towards the end of the afternoon of that day, we found ourselves entering a more hospitable country. Near a little place called Umm Er Rezan (a few stone houses and a hospital on the top of a climb) grass, green plots and dwarf trees began to appear (Fig. 7). Here was a cluster of short-trunked palms, there a little grove of dwarf thorns with brambly shoots and an undergrowth of wet grass. This was our first ‘green belt’, and after the hard upthrown glare from the bare sand, the greenness was like balm on the eyes.

  Towards evening, after a happy afternoon, we came to the upland village of Maturba (Fig. 7), a cluster of undamaged stone houses by the side of a small single-domed mosque. Below the village and in the valley bottom was a grove of palm trees, screening the square houses and the disused filling station from the road – and even a football pitch complete with goalposts. Best of all to our eyes, between palms and village ran a pipe, flanked by two tall standing Fascist pillars and flowing with fresh greenish water into a big concrete cistern. We lost no time in filling our depleted tanks, cans and bottles.

  We camped that night on the high ground above the village, pleased to have the opportunity of resting for a while in this green country.1 It was more like British scenery than we had seen: it reminded me of Sutherland, as it is inland from Dornoch and Brora.2 The rolling moorland, bounding and pitching and revealing leagues of distance, was, at close sight, only thinly covered with verdure. Slabs and boulders of grey rock pushed themselves through this thin covering and strewed the near hillsides; and in the shelter of them grew marigolds, big and little, a pale yellow weed-like charlock, lamb’s lugs, autumn crocuses flat and starry on the levels of the ground, and best of all, our English lords-and-ladies, Jack-in-the-pulpit – the wild arum. In the distance, boulders, weeds and flowers merged into a duskiness of colouring that gave the impression of uninterrupted heatheriness.

  Not even the great cold of these uplands could rob us of a feeling of pleasure at having escaped from the sandy desert. Here we had what we had been longing for for months – coolness, a green landscape, pools of standing water. During our first night we had more water than we desired. The rain came down suddenly, beating with violence on the flimsy bivvies and flowing in streams around and through them. I woke at four o’clock to find little rivers channelling past and underneath me, and the water dripping through the leaky roof of the gharry on to our instruments.

  Fortunately, after breakfast, the rain ceased. We had to re-cover the gharry with our useful tarpaulin and look for better quarters. Near us luckily were a few roofless, bomb-blasted Italian aerodrome buildings, with wood enough in them to feed big fires. We managed to dry our blankets, and some of us slept the next night in a native wogra – a shocking damp, boggy fold, which we rehabilitated and christened the Charnel House. It was a three-sided stone pen, which we had first to drain and then roof over – a dank vault of a place, smelling of toads and slime – but dry overhead.

  Black Book: Wednesday 18 November

  We are still here and operational. It is a blessed rest after our days of hectic travelling. But no complaints. We have travelled 400 miles and more, but have seen less of the war than when we were at PT 97.3

  A few days later we entered on a period of our journeying of which I do not care to write much. The Crossley, old when we set out, was by this time in serious need of an overhaul, and we had to return to El Adem (Fig. 6) before we found a repair unit capable of dealing with it.4 No countryside could be barer and more wearying than the land there. After a week of profitless waiting, we took up the chase again, retraced our steps to Maturba, and then began a long drive through the heart of Cyrenaica to Benghasi (Fig. 7).

  I shall always think of Monday 30 November as one of the most memorable days in our journey. At first we advanced through Maturba – like moorland, spacious country with vast views and deep wadis filled with white pebbles. On the heights above Maturba village were the ruins of an old Arab stronghold. Farther on, we saw others in better condition, dominating the landscapes like the border castles in England, and in design, not unlike them. But since the highlands of Cyrenaica had never been seriously defended by either side in the desert campaigns, and in the main the landscape hid whatever ruin there was more than the naked sand, it looked a happier country. As we climbed and dropped over a high ridge we came upon a fair land of field, woodland and ploughland – the home of the Cyrenaican colonists. It was uniformly green, with everywhere low bushy coppices of evergreens, thorns and thin-leaved willow-like trees, fine with flowers and musical with birds. Arabs, not the ghostly grey-clad nomads we had seen, went up and down turning over with mule- and camel-drawn ploughs the rich red-brown earth; and the countryside was constellated with the white farmsteads of the Italian colonists.

  During our first advance,5 the colonists had stayed on their farms; during the second,6 they had crowded into the zone centres; this time they had nearly all been evacuated and we were at liberty to look at their homes. The Italian Government had provided for them a modest but pleasing house. It was neat, appropriate and well-designed. At the front was a shady portico and the main door led from there to a big farm kitchen with wide fireplace and stone floor (Plate 16). This in turn, led on one side into two bedrooms, on another into the sitting room, and on the third into the stockyard, flanked with a big stall which must have served as a byre, stable, sty and roost, all in one. To one side of the building was a capacious underground cistern capable of holding thousands of gallons of water, with inspection covers and a hand pump. With its clear, straight lines and flat roof, its clean whitewash and simple architectural pattern of lines and semicircles, the farmstead looked a compact and efficient little living place.

  No one was allowed to forget that fascism had built this house. Fascism had conquered the land, fascism had ploughed and built, fascism had installed the furniture, fascism had transported the settler from Italy to his new home. Each house was marked Ente Colonizzazione Libya, followed by the number of the fascist year in which it had been completed. A stone fasces7 adorned the front wall, a wooden fasces the door of the wardrobe. A saw from the book of Mussolini was stencilled in black on the whitewash, backed up in most cases, with a slogan in bigger letters Rex, Dux, Credere, Obbedire, Combattere etc. One abandoned farmstead, which we examined, flaunted this:

  IL DUCE HA SEMPRE RAGIONE

  (The Duce is always right)

  in letters worn and fading, as if they were not quite sure now of the truth of their message: and on one of the bigger buildings nearby was this piece of nonsense:

  ‘ACT ALWAYS AS IF THE DUCE HIMSELF WAS WATCHING YOU’

  These farmsteads, abandoned, sometimes bullet-marked, and their rooms littered with torn mattresses and the feathers and entrails of immolated chickens and empty bully tins, evoked pity; but the compassion was offset by contempt for the stupidity of those who had provoked the war, who had thought that conceit and bravado were enough to win it and had forgotten how absurd and childish their braggings would look in a day of defeat. In all probability the peasants had not been responsible for these daubed slogans: it looked as if, before Mussolini drove through Cyrenaica to reach Alexandria for the triumphal march, his yes-men had run on before him with tar and brush.

  We drove on past these little white villas, with their ploughed and brambly woodlands, until we stopped to camp later in the evening in a little dingle off the road near De Martino (Fig. 7). That evening was full of fine murmurings, and the little notes of birds invisible in the greenery. A still day died lingeringly. Its wraith hung pale apple-green over the western upland. After dinner I climbed in the last light out of the dingle and to the summit of a little hill, and looked out over to the west where the pale luminousness gave mystery to the distant ranges and milk-white stars wavered in the darkening sky. There my mind went out with a great longing over the hills and seas,
over a continent to where my wife was. I felt as if the distance was annihilated. Just so might I have been looking over the chimneys of my own house over an English moor. I could almost put out my hand and touch my own country. It was a moving moment. A scent came from the bushes and coolness fell from the bright air.

  PLATE 16 ‘Italian colonists’ farm near Barce’. The fascist inscription on the facade reads: Il Duce ha sempre ragione – ‘The Duce is always right’

  When I found my way back there were glow-worms alight in the bushes, and mushrooms collected and put in water for breakfast. I went to sleep in my bivvy beneath the leaves, grateful for the sight of good country, for water, for peace, and for the visitation of joy that the evening had given.

  Some time later, I read how Aeneas in his wanderings had landed on the coast near our camping place, and had spent a forced holiday feasting and hunting the stag over this very country. I re-read in Virgil the story of that holiday, and it seemed that just that pleasure that Virgil had taken in Cyrenaica and had imagined Aeneas enjoying, I too had felt that starry night on the hill near De Martino.

  Goodbye to Cyrenaica

  The next day there were views more magnificent and arresting than we had hoped for. The road climbed from the little dingle where we had slept for the night (Plate 17), then drawing near to Barce (Fig. 7), fell away, curving through a noble pass. From the head of the pass, driving between craggy boulders and precariously rooted trees flinging out their branches like falling men their arms, we looked down, through a v-shaped frame of hillside, on to a stretching level plain, green with gardens and orchards, and dark-brown with ploughed earth. This was the richest part of Cyrenaica, made fat and fertile by Italian labour.