The Italians were in the main friendly, and their friendliness and readiness to fraternize precluded compassion; but one sight I remember especially. We strolled, rather timorously, into the yard of a big farmhouse. We went hesitantly, not desiring to disturb the privacy of the family. On the steps of the veranda were sitting a youth, an older girl, and behind them, in a rocking chair, was the mother. There was no grown man to be seen. The old woman was knitting, the younger people doing nothing at all. Their silence was so dignified that we hardly dared to approach them; but Jack, the cook, went up to them and said hesitantly, ‘Beida? Uova?’ The old woman looked up and said only one word, ‘Niente.’ ‘Come away, Jack’, I said, and we withdrew shamefacedly. Niente. Nothing at all. What had that old woman lost, to make her say ‘Niente’ so finally and woefully? Who knows?
That night when I lay down to sleep, I could hear somewhere in front of us a dull report – buboom – buboom. It was the noise of two 88mm German guns holding up the spearhead of our advance in the pass between Tarhuna and Castel Benito (Fig. 9). As I fell asleep I could still hear buboom, buboom, buboom. The gunners were still holding the pass. But I woke again for some reason towards early morning, and the guns were silent. The road to Castel Benito was clear.
Castel Benito
The next morning, after a long wait, we began to file slowly through the gorge out of Tarhuna. During the day, word went round that Castel Benito was burning, and when we settled down in the darkness of that evening, we thought we could see the glow of the fires. What a night! Long after darkness had come down, lorry after lorry came rolling out of the gorge, convoy after convoy fanned out and deployed over the plain. It seemed as if all that immense volume of traffic that had poured through the breach at El Alamein, and then dispersed over the Libyan desert, was now reassembling for the entry into Tripoli. Jeep and three-tonner, staff car and ‘ops’ gharry,10 gun carriage and supply waggon, all came rumbling out of the defile in endless succession. The big plain, which was the only available leaguering place, was as overcrowded as a slum in half an hour. A quiet corner picked out for safety was invaded by new arrivals even before the tent pegs were driven in; and long after we had gone to bed, the night was loud with the shouting of directions, the clashing of gears, and the churning of big wheels in the soft sand.
We were up again before the stars were out of the sky, and packing hastily to get on to the road before the bulk of the traffic began to move; and of the next hours I can remember scarcely anything. Perhaps we leaguered for another night, perhaps we didn’t. Nothing remains in my mind but haste, expectation, trepidation as we swung off the main track through possible mine belts, and a great longing to arrive. At last, at long last, we were driving along green avenues. It was a gloriously clear morning, all greenness and blueness, with a breeze that made a noise in the leaves of the eucalyptus trees. That little noise was a lovely sound to us. Vivid after the long silence of the treeless desert, it was sounding us into cornfields and orchards again.
Under the peeled eucalyptus trees, and in the groves of olives and lemons, lay the last wreckage of Libya’s defenders. At one point near an almond tree in blossom was a shattered medical supply waggon, with phials and bottles and lint and plaster littered in the ditch. At another, someone with a taste for irony had taken a big portrait of Mussolini, and leant it against a tree trunk, so that the grim face of the Duce was looking sternly towards the victorious stream of traffic that was driving upon his prized city. Here the dictator was holding his last Libyan review, and past him came the varied traffic of the conquerors – tank carriers with their crews sitting high, in black berets on the turret; Bren carriers, every rider yellow with dust; soldiers joyriding in captured Volkswagens; carloads of redcaps, stiff and solemn; jeeps with officers with maps on their knees, and gharries of African pioneers wearing overcoats even in this sunshine. Almost every gharry carried the name of some remembered English girl; there were Beryls and Margarets and Gwens by the score. Some flaunted their nicknames, ‘The Geordies’,11 ‘Brummagem Lads’,12 ‘The Rank Outsiders’, and some their slogans. One, I remember, displayed a big black painting of a teapot, and round it this gem of desert philosophy – ‘When in doubt, brew up’. Down the road they came, nose to tail, all swinging their emblem and tavern sign, the sooty and treasured chai bucket.
Then we were at Castel Benito, parked under the big pylons that belonged to the airport, waiting for the word to jump down and settle in (Fig. 9). It came. On the spot where Mussolini had received the sword of Islam many years ago, General Montgomery received the keys of Tripoli. Rommel was still retreating and Libya was ours at last.
Knowing that we would be given a rest here, we drove the Crossley out into the middle of an olive grove, and commandeered a set of rooms in the Regia Aeronautica13 buildings. Not one of these blocks had been hit by a bomb. The bombing had been accurately centred on the hangars and the airfield. The fittings were all in disorder, the rooms dirty, and the floor littered with broken wood and paper, glass and documents. But to us, every room was a palace. In half an hour we assembled all our treasure-trove – tables, soft-seated chairs, a kitchen with range and sink, mattresses and beds, bookshelves, suitcases and lamps. We swept the rooms and set up home. Then the Arabs came to the windows, with eggs and vegetables in exchange for tea and biscuits, and we had supper royal in our new establishment. We bathed and changed our clothes, and celebrated the victory with cheap Italian red wine. There was ripe festivity that night, ending, not unexpectedly with Cookie’s sporting a black eye acquired in some melee, and meekly receiving another lecture from the puritanical sergeant. But drunk or sober, everyone was filled with a glorious sense of achievement and release.
Yet for the life of me, I could not feel at first the relief I ought to have felt. To begin with, I could not sleep well. I had slept too long on the ground or in the protective hollow of a sagging camp-bed. I even fell out of bed the first night; and every night, as soon as darkness came, I was unusually haunted by a feeling of uneasiness and insecurity. I suppose it was a kind of claustrophobia. After so many months feeding, washing and sleeping in the open, I could not use myself to four walls and a roof. After sunset I was the victim of the most unreasonable fears.
Nevertheless Castel Benito was a beautiful place to us. The hangars on the airfield were only skeletons by the time we got there, with roofs and walls blasted off their bare ribs. The landing ground was littered with abandoned and destroyed aircraft. In one corner the wrecks were piled high. The buildings in the village were deserted, and the school a shambles of maps, inkwells, exercise books, chalk, broken seats and cupboards. But the airfield was green and unploughed.14 Before the Germans could plough it, the ploughmen who had furrowed such fantastic patterns in the sand at Ghindel and Buerat were dispersed and their ploughs destroyed, and the spring evenings were mellow and peaceful over the broken township. There were orderly olive groves, and fields of young corn coming up, with lines of cypress and eucalyptus along them; the days were steadily fine, and the sun shone brilliantly upon the flowers in the hedges, the almond blossom, and the white of the wellheads. Not even the arrival later of seldom-seen adjutants, discipline corporals and sergeants with their sheets of rules and regulations, could seriously spoil the charm of our stay there.
At Castel Benito I met one evening a group of Italian civilians who had been loosely interned there. They had been evacuated from Benghasi but finally left behind in the hurried evacuation of Tripolitania. Most of them spoke good French and were willing to talk. We said very little about the war. They talked most readily about the archaeological glories of Libya – Cyrene, Leptis Magna and Sabratha; and in turn they asked me about P. G. Wodehouse, Bernard Shaw, Jerome K. Jerome and other English humorists whom they had read and admired. I felt that in our conversations, Mussolini had suffered as great a defeat as at the hands of General Montgomery. The allegiances of these men were not to the much-boasted achievements of fascism, but to the common international achievements
of Roman architecture and English literature. The new philosophy of the glorification of war and of race arrogance had left them untouched. I shall always remember those bankers from Benghasi for their learning and their courtesy.
Notes
1 The white ribbon marked the secure track to be followed, as distinct from the dangerous mined areas.
2 Desert tracks were boards, carried on the gharry of Unit 606, which could be placed under the wheels to give them purchase when travelling over soft sand.
3 It is unclear why AMES 606 was left undefended, but new Kittyhawks model III were introduced in December 1942, and it may have been that the rotation of the old and new aircraft affected the cover they could give against air attack.
4 The armoured cars were to protect Unit 606 and its precious radar kit.
5 Washing clothes.
6 Another radar unit, perhaps Unit 607, or a unit of a different series (such as an AMES 500 Unit).
7 From Italy (Sicily) and possibly Greece (Crete) (Fig. 5).
8 260 Squadron’s ORB records that their advance party left ahead of AMES 606. 260 Squadron’s ‘A’ party moved on 13 January ‘and proceeded to Bir Durfan; this took 6 days. On this occasion ‘A’ Party followed the army very closely,’ 12 January, 1943, AIR 27/1537, TNA, PRO.
9 Backsheesh means alms or a gift.
10 Ops gharry or radar-carrying gharry.
11 From Newcastle
12 From Birmingham
13 Italian Air Force.
14 Ploughing would have made the airfield beyond the runways unusable as a landing strip.
CHAPTER 7
The Cities and Towns of Tripolitania: Reflections on Libya
Tripoli
At Castel Benito, Homs was behind us, and I knew to my great regret that I had missed Libya’s second great sight, the city of Leptis Magna (Fig. 9). Pursuit had hurried me past the remains of both Greek glory in Cyrenaica and Roman glory in Tripolitania. It was for that reason that I looked forward with special anticipation to Tripoli (Fig. 9). Tripoli was one of the great Roman cities in North Africa. Under the strange name of Oea it had attained some consequence, and in the later days of the empire, Septimus Severus, whose statue used to stand in the Piazza near the Castello, had greatly embellished it. It was overrun first by the Berbers and then by the Arabs, became in the Middle Ages a Corsair port, passed eventually under Turkish dominion, and was ruled lackadaisically by the Caramanli Pashas until it was ceded to Italy at the Treaty of Lausanne in 1912. Roman remains, the vestiges of near-eastern picturesqueness, the bold architecture of fascism at its most determined – I hoped to see them all. Besides, having looked so long at a country where Nature only had been at work, I was anxious to see again the handiwork of civilized man.
There was another, more worldly, element in my impatience. While we were near Alamein, we had looked back to Alexandria as the earthly paradise – the town of civilians, lights, cinemas, music, the gastronomic delights of ice cream and chocolate, the human pleasures of clean baths and clean clothes. Once the offensive began, Tripoli became the centre of our hopes and daydreams. It shone in our imaginations as the second Alex, the home of all luxuries.
Our doubts as to Tripoli’s fitness to play the part of another Alexandria to hungry and thirsty campaigners were first awakened by the Italian civilians at Castel Benito. When I told them how much we were looking forward to ice cream and iced beer and fresh fruit, they laughed and said, ‘So are we, Monsieur! We too have forgotten what those things taste like. But you will find nothing at Tripoli. It is une ville morte.’
So indeed it looked when we first visited it – a sad, frightened, dead town. There were very few Italians on the streets, and no shops were open. It was a town of shocked and mistrustful citizens still unsure as to how the British were going to treat them. Within a few days however they gathered confidence. When they realized that the Tommies were not the vicious decadent Anglo-Saxon looters that fascist propaganda had made them out to be, but honest folk, prepared to pay for everything they had, they began to take down the shutters and open the doors, and stocks of souvenirs and clothing, hidden away for weeks, were brought out for sale. Before this happened and shopping began in earnest, I had time to look round the city and see it as it was in the first few days of occupation.
Like all eastern cities where Europeans rule, it consisted of two parts – the old and the new. In Tripoli those two parts were clearly separate, and the point of division was the Moorish Castello. The Castello stood in the heart of the city, and was almost the midpoint of the large arc formed by the harbour. The harbour itself was small, protected by two moles, which almost closed it in, and halcyon in its calmness. A great number of ships lay burnt, broken and listed there. One most forlorn wreck was the burnt skeleton of a big green and white troopship, which lay across the mouth of the bay; but the arc of blue water was bounded by a fine almost unspoilt promenade, the Lungomare Conte Volpi, an elegant drive balustraded, and planted with little greens and dwarf palms, and spoilt only by the rows of rather ugly iron flagpoles set all along its length. Near the castle, a broad flight of steps ran up from the water’s edge to the promenade, flanked by two tall shapely but fragile pillars, one carrying a statue of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, and the other a three-masted schooner, the emblem of Tripoli. It was just behind those pillars that the big, solid Moorish castle rose – with its back towards the old city and its face turned towards the new city – and beneath it a statue of Mussolini, mercifully hidden from ironic eyes by walls of sandbags.
The old city behind it was a maze of small alleys, wide enough only for wheelbarrows, arched over for most of their length with trellis work carrying old vine stems, and housing diminutive shops with diminutive windows, diminutive counters and diminutive stocks, so dark inside that a candle was necessary even at midday. From these ways led even smaller alleys and wynds with mysterious house fronts, doors bolted and shut, leading to sordid penthouses where silversmiths worked, to broader rooms hung with carpets and smelling exotically of strong perfumes, to mosques with thick pillars and carved arches. Here were grimy artisans, notably industrious, forging with heaps of charcoal and cinders at their side, or hammering away at knick-knacks; there, wealthier citizens in black silk galabeyas and gold-coloured headdresses. Occasionally a reverend and patriarchal Senussi sat drinking coffee from a tiny cup in the open street, while past him wandered poor Italians, Jews, Berbers, Palestinians and Africans. Everywhere there was a fascinating play of light and shadow in the alleyways, glimpses of mystery, of past riches and hidden magnificence.
But if there was age and charm of age in the old town, it was modern, industrial, mass-producing Italy that filled the shops. These shops, most of them the size of a good English cupboard, were laid out hugger-mugger with cheap laces, garish silks, inferior soaps, razors and blades, poor postcards and tawdry little handkerchiefs with Ricorda da Libya stamped carelessly on them. Foolish to look for treasures of eastern craftsmanship. The Tripoli Arab was the Cairo Arab all over again, with the same eye for profit. The silversmiths, for example, lost no time in bringing their wares up to date. The ring that had been begun for an Afrikakorps panzer soldier ended on the finger of a kilted Scot.
The new town was not as well planned as it might have been. The unity, which was the excellence of the finer zone centres, was not so well sustained here. Nevertheless the streets were wide and spacious, leading away from the Castello in bold straight lines. Most of the buildings were good in design, modern and coloured a glistening white. The severity of their rectangularity was in places relieved by ornamental balconies in filigree ironwork, painted a pleasant green for easy contrast; and on the outskirts of the town masses of bougainvillea made the whiteness of the walls whiter still. Had the general architectural style (which enabled modern buildings like the tall Hotel Waddan to harmonize with older structures like the Castello) been consistently employed, Tripoli would have been a real triumph; but here and there the Italian decorators ha
d unhappily varied the pure white of their best buildings with a dull dispiriting pink, and abandoned the simplicity of their best architectural form for the neo-orientalism of the Grand Hotel and the baroque of the Cathedral. In spite of these mistakes, Tripoli must have had in the days of peace the virtues of cleanliness and elegance. Most of its buildings are worthy civic architecture, and it impressed as a whiter and brighter city than Cairo.
When we came to it, however, it was broken, hungry and poor. Soldiers and airmen were forbidden to buy essential foods from civilians; but the ban was unnecessary. There was virtually no food for sale. Natives hawked a few bitter oranges, slabs of sticky almond toffee, sweetbreads of strange make, and villainous ice cream; and in the bazaars we could buy a few nuts. But the people were gravely short of cereals, and over the disorganized city hung the other threat of typhus. Soon the old city was out of bounds.
For most of the men who saw it in those days, Tripoli was a great disappointment. The last and most prized city of the Italian empire, where there was to be feasting and carousing, turned out to be a hungry and fever-stricken city where it was easier to buy a ring for a quarter pound of tea than a pound note, and a packet of biscuits was more welcome to a shopkeeper than a shilling.
Before we left Tripoli I saw one of the relics of the Roman city, the arch of Marcus Aurelius, a seventeen hundred year old monument, which the Italians found buried but still standing when they occupied Tripoli. This arch does not aspire to the soaring ambitiousness of the fascist propaganda monuments. It is only about twenty-five feet high and eight feet of that is below the level of the square in which it stands. Arab builders consciously or unconsciously did their best to hide or overshadow it; even now it stands in unimposing surroundings. The Italians however restored it, cleaned it, and tidied the adjacent pathways; so that even against its rather untidy background it stands out as a solid and impressive structure, preaching the same moral – the solidity and durability of old Roman building seen against the chancy fragility of the more arrogant fascist erections.
War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel during the Western Desert Campaign, 1942-3 Page 18
