War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel during the Western Desert Campaign, 1942-3
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‘Cheerio!’ the men shouted as we ran down to them to shake hands and give them cigarettes, ‘Cheerio – we’ll get the bastards’ scalps, if they don’t get ours!’
‘Cheerio!’ we shouted back. ‘We’ll be with you baden!’
But I, for one, did not follow. The next day, before we could get away, I was recalled to Cairo. While the battle was being fought, I was on my way back.
Goodbye to the desert
From Medenine to Castel Benito I saw the desert as I had not seen it before (Fig. 9). Flying low, I could look down and see all the colour which the desert showed only to the sun and the flyer – the light fawn of the sand, the grey and brown of the clumps of scrub, the pale mauve of drying salt-pans glistening like frost in the sunlight, the pale green mist of young corn and the more brilliant buttercup yellow of the desert weeds, the white of Italian villages against the sombre-hued poplars and cypresses. But from Castel Benito to Cairo, we climbed high. From 5000 feet, only the major markings of the desert were visible, the branched figurings of the wadis, as if water had been spilt there, and had dried dark brown, and the unfinished fields of the ploughed land, dark against the paleness of the sand. There was one moment of extreme beauty when, as the sun lowered, it threw its beams almost horizontally, and caught the ears of standing corn, making them pollen-coloured in the gathering darkness.
But all the signs of the great battles seemed to have gone. The littered wreckage, the vast dumps of abandoned material, the fortifications in the wadis, the once-famous battle lines and tracks had faded like ghosts. The desert had already begun to smooth them out.
I knew that, just as the sand was smudging out all the visible signs of that three-year-long struggle, so too time would blur for me the memory of those days. Not long after the end of the campaign, I met an officer who had been in the desert with Wavell and Auchinleck, and up to Benghasi in the last offensive. We began talking about the places we knew.
‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘that landing ground inland from Derna? Oh that was a bloody cold place if ever there was one. It was – what did they call the damned place? Damn me, I’ve forgotten it already.’
Only a few months after leaving the desert, he was forgetting it. So that I should not forget, and perhaps to help others not to forget, I have written this account.
The desert was a grim place, but I said goodbye to it with mixed feelings. Nowhere had I felt so godforsaken, nowhere nearer to Lear’s poor un-accommodated man, nowhere less at the mercy of a stonyhearted Nature that gave no comforts. Yet some good came out of it. In that land where Nature stinted almost everything, we went close to the mentality of a poor un-provided people, who have little to rejoice in but their own effort. We were like the Aran islanders, for whom a board, a piece of rope, a stick were so irreplaceable that they assumed a value denied them in a world of plenty: and against this background of poverty and privation, pleasures won added poignancy. Over and above these, out of the abounding health that sun and air and labour bequeathed us, there often rose a power of mystical exaltation in the presence of the great expanses of land and sky.
In these last few lines, let me pay out my tributes. First, to our faithful old gharry; it was almost obsolete when it was first brought out from Cairo. On our very first journey, the petrol feedpipe broke,3 and continued to break for the next five months. The engine often refused to start, yet it never failed to get under way in the end. The roof leaked until we nailed an old tarpaulin over it. The rocky desert shook all the screws in the framework loose, but we re-screwed them to the framework and it held together. It sank up to the axles in marsh, but it was always pulled out. There was water in the sump and the air pump would not work. Yet it carried nine men to Mareth, and eight on from there to Tunis, and was in at the death.4
Secondly, here is a record of the names of the men who made up the unit, who bickered and quarrelled like any other body of men but who shared possessions of pocket and mind, and played their part, although a very minor part in the defeat of the Germans: Sergeant Clark from Tynemouth, Corporal Pryce from Wrexham, Bob Holden from Leeds (killed in action, autumn 1943), Alec Young from Glasgow, Norman Taylor from Walsall, Roy Hazlewood from Burton, Jack Scott from Blackburn, Harry Allen from Nottingham, and Sid Rapperport from Cambridge (see Appendix II).
Lastly, all honour to the Eighth Army and the rest of the Navy and Air Force men who fought in this campaign. Their heroism protected us every day; they were the best of companions, and it was through their valour that the three-year Libyan nightmare ended in victory and jubilation.
Notes
1 Hurricanes were in the process of being replaced by Spitfires in North Africa early in 1943.
2 A fortification in which guns are mounted.
3 The feedpipe from the petrol tank to the engine.
4 The Germans hung on in Tunisia until May 1943.
Epilogue
Ironically, Fred’s departure from the desert coincided with that of the defeated Field Marshal Rommel, though unlike Rommel, Fred still had many years ahead of him. His re-call to Cairo, where he was offered a commission, and subsequent deployment to Eastleigh in Kenya, where he became a Flight Lieutenant and Education Officer until the end of the war, in many ways marked the beginning of the rest of his life. Thanks to Fred’s substantial experience of adult education in Africa he was ideally suited, after demobilization in 1946, to join the English Department of the newly-founded Teacher Training College in Worcester. He remained in Worcester until his death; surprisingly, given his deep attachment to the landscapes of the north of England, Worcester rather than Durham, became his home.
As the Highland Monarch was pulling away from the dock in Avonmouth in 1942, Fred wrote prophetically, ‘many a good man and boy will not come back from this voyage – or if he does, never the same fellow’. He could not have known that the same words would apply equally to the wives and sweethearts left behind. Gwen, so ardently missed and idealized in Fred’s verse, had a very different war from his. She struggled with a sharp drop in income (for a long time Fred’s teacher’s salary was reduced to that of an aircraftsman), danger from frequent nightly air-raids, the loneliness of bringing up a young child on her own and finally ill-health caused by malnutrition. Once Fred was demobilized, Gwen was determined to put the war and the North East behind her.
While many of Fred’s later wartime experiences in Africa are recorded in his journals, they are sporadic and never quite equal the excitement and camaraderie of life in Unit 606. This intense period, living and working in close proximity with a disparate group of men, must have been the nearest Fred ever came as an adult to experiencing once again the warmth, closeness and shared endeavour of the colliery in which he grew up. The sense of belonging to that impoverished but tight-knit community was something he missed for the rest of his life. Fred had enjoyed many aspects of the military campaign in the desert. Despite the plain diet of M & V, he was, for those months on the move, uncharacteristically free from digestive problems. Sleeping close to nature, under the stars or in a tent, was always his idea of bliss. As a family we camped for many years in the most rudimentary of tents and with the minimum of equipment, apart from Fred’s trusty RAF billy-can and folding canvas washstand!
Gillian Clarke
Appendix I
Frederick Grice’s Major Publications
Folk Tales of the North Country, London: Nelson, 1944.
Folk Tales of the West Midlands, London: Nelson, 1952.
Folk Tales of Lancashire, London: Nelson, 1953.
Aidan and the Strollers, London: Jonathan Cape, 1960.
The Bonny Pit Laddie, London: OUP, 1960.
The Moving Finger, London: OUP, 1962.
Rebels and Fugitives, London: Batsford, 1963.
A Severnside Story, London: OUP, 1964.
Dildrum King of the Cats, London: OUP, 1967.
The Luckless Apple, London: OUP, 1966.
The Oak and the Ash, London: OUP, 1968.
T
he Courage of Andy Robson, London: OUP, 1969
The Black Hand Gang, London: OUP, 1971.
Young Tom Sawbones, London: OUP, 1972.
Nine Days’ Wonder, London: OUP, 1976.
Johnny Head-in-Air, Oxford: OUP, 1978.
Francis Kilvert and his World, Horsham: Caliban Books, 1982.
Water Break its Neck, Oxford: OUP, 1986.
Appendix II
Members of Unit 606 as recorded in the Photographs (Plates 3 and 15)
Flight Sergeant Nobby Clark, Tynemouth
Corporal Jack Pryce, Wrexham
Harry Allen (H. Cookie), Nottingham
Fred Grice, Durham
*Roy Hazlewood, Burton
Robert (Bob) Holden, Leeds, killed 1943
Sid Rapperport, Cambridge
Jack Scott (Cookie), Blackburn
Norman Taylor, Walsall
Alec Young, Glasgow
*Roy and Jimmy (who appears in the photographs, but not in Fred’s listing at the end of the book) left Unit 606 to joint Unit 607 before El Adem, but Roy returned to Unit 606 by Christmas 1942.
Associates of Unit 606:
Sergeant Budd was in charge of Unit 607, but appears in some photographs.
Squadron Leader M. H. Young was in charge of 606 and 607 and perhaps more units on the ground for a short time in October-November 1942.