Soldiers Made Me Look Good

by Lewis MacKenzie

  At that perfectly timed moment (luck), two three-quarter-ton trucks drove down the track we were straddling. They were completly unaware of our presence and stopped about twenty yards in front of us. Perhaps ten of the defenders rushed up to greet them, and the stars were aligned. I fired my rifle as we stood up in unison, and we rushed forward towards a bewildered platoon of defenders, of whom at least half were separated from their weapons, having left them behind when to greet the vehicles. The last thing we needed was prisoners to slow us down, so we gathered up their weapons and indicated to the neutral umpire on the site that we were destroying them. Meanwhile, our demolition team placed the explosives around and on the missile. When we were less than a minute away from the site, the time-delay fuse went off and the missile crumpled to the ground.

  Right then we were the most vulnerable. It was daylight, it had stopped raining and we had hundreds of enemy soldiers between us and our friendly lines. We opted for speed over stealth, and in hindsight I think the organizers decided to reward our success on the objective by giving us a free run as we trekked the twenty miles back to the safety of our own lines.

  The following day, wearing full kit, we completed the last part of the competition, a forced march of ten miles over rough terrain in less than two hours. The guys made it look easy, and we waited on tenterhooks for the following week until it was announced that we had won the competition by a convincing margin.

  You see what I mean about luck—even the weather can influence a career. With no wind, no rain, no high-quality German forestry maintenance, no timely arrival of two trucks and no outstanding Sergeant Huey Graham and thirty-two of the finest Canadian soldiers, those twenty-four hours could have been an unmitigated disaster. My career might never have recovered.

  8: Libyan Desert Dust-up

  “A three-day exercise in the desert was terminated after a few hours and the ‘enemy’ was victorious, thanks to ‘low Canadian cunning.’ ”

  LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR PATRICK HOWARD-DOBSON

  IN EARLY 1967, seven years after my commissioning, I was still a lieutenant.* I had just completed a two-month staff course and was preparing to return to Cyprus for a second tour, when somewhere just east of Fort William (now part of Thunder Bay), on my way to Calgary, my car radio crackled: “Lieutenant Lewis MacKenzie should report to the nearest police station at his earliest opportunity.” I assumed the worst and decided that either my mother or father, or both, had met an untimely end. Thirty minutes later I was handed a single sheet of paper by the night-shift duty policeman at a detachment in Fort William. The teletype read, “Posting to 2nd Battalion Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada for Cyprus tour of duty cancelled. Report ASP to Army Personnel Directorate, Ottawa, for processing prior to proceeding to Germany for two-year exchange posting with the Royal Sussex Regiment, 10th Armoured Brigade, British Army on the Rhine, stationed in Lemgo, West Germany.”

  Two weeks later I was in Lemgo, joining a battalion that was still arriving from its tour of duty in strife-torn Aden, at that time the capital of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. I was assigned to C Company as second-in-command, despite my lowly rank.

  In 1967, before Colonel Muammar Gaddafi had seized power, King Idris ruled Libya and Britain had an agreement to assist with the security of Libya’s borders if they were threatened from outside, Egypt being the prime suspect. As a result, the British Army regularly rotated its battalions of infantry and armoured regiments through a month’s desert-warfare training in the Libyan desert a few hours west of Tobruk and south of the Mediterranean coastal town of Timimi. As the threat of an Egyptian incursion heightened, my new battalion was moved up the deployment schedule, thanks to their recent tour in the hot climate of Aden.

  Early on in our deployment procedures, I was advised that army HQ had denied me permission to proceed to Libya with my British Army company. Presumably they were concerned that if Egypt attacked Libya and my battalion was required to respond, the Canadian government would be less than happy that a Canadian officer had been involved in the battle. I was devastated. In the short time I had been with the battalion, I had integrated well with my British colleagues and got along with my company commander, Major Charles Tarver, and the company sergeant major, “Chippy” Wood. Now I was supposed to wave farewell as they departed for North Africa and sit around waiting until they came home, regaling me with the usual “Man, you should have been there!” I had to do something.

  I drove the sixty miles to Soest, the home of the headquarters of the 4th Canadian Brigade Group, and visited the brigade major, the second-most-influential appointment in the entire Canadian army in Germany next to the commander. Major Charlie Belzile was the incumbent, and in spite of the significant difference in our ranks we were good friends. I had served as the reconnaissance platoon commander attached to his rifle company during a major amphibious exercise on the west coast of Vancouver Island some three years earlier, and we had taken the parachute-qualifying course together a year earlier. Charlie, immediately seeing a loophole in the crisis, sent me on thirty days’ special leave and didn’t ask where I was going. (Risk-aversion was not something Charlie understood, which probably explains why he ended up commanding our army for five years, retiring as a lieutenant-general with the respect of all who worked for him.)

  Huddled in the back of British Army trucks, we made the two-hour journey from the airport at Tobruk to Timimi. Then, turning our backs on the azure-blue Mediterranean, we turned south for the thirty-mile drive to the British camp. We all waited for our mental image of the desert to materialize. Having served in the Gaza Strip for two years, I thought I knew what to expect: magnificent sand dunes and endless expanses of flat, sandy nothing. The desert in north Libya, however, is misnamed. It is cement-hard clay, topped with rocks of all sizes, maxing out with boulders the size of Jeeps strewn about the terrain. Since the desert floor can’t absorb the moisture of the occasional rains, the rushing surface water cuts ditches, which harden when the water evaporates, leaving scars that make cross-country movement by vehicles bone-jarring and creating ankle-breaking obstacles for foot soldiers like us, particularly at night.

  Thirty miles later, we spotted the austere British camp in the distance. Hundreds of sun-bleached tents in a massive circle surrounding a flagpole was the extent of the “construction.” As we got closer, I could make out the vehicle park and the vehicles we would be taking over from the Parachute Regiment, which was on its way back to the United Kingdom. Every one of them had a large white cross on the windshield, or on their sides if they were armoured personnel carriers (APCs) . I assumed the cross was intended to identify neutral umpires who would be assessing the success or failure of our exercises. Then I heard one of the soldiers say, “Look at all those PCC’d vehicles!” I asked, “What does PCC mean?” His response was not encouraging. “I don’t know what the initials stand for, but I do know that it means a vehicle has been written off and is only good for cannibalizing or, I guess, training in the desert!” His guess was right.

  The heat was oppressive but bearable, averaging around 45°C at midday. Our company routine started with us working hard for the first two hours after sunrise and the last two hours before dark. Each day we added two hours of work to the beginning and end of daylight. After four days of this, we were acclimatized and conducting training throughout the day. Moving across the desert on foot with fifty-pound packs, ammunition and weapons, we were consuming water at a rate of “a water bottle per man per mile.”

  After two weeks on the ground it was announced that our 10th Armoured Brigade commander, Brigadier Patrick Howard-Dobson, would be flying in from Germany to visit us in about three days. Our commanding officer had been planning an ambitious exercise for his battalion, starting the next day, so the timing was perfect: the brigadier would see our entire battalion well into the exercise and under more stressful conditions.

  We were delighted when the exercise orders were issued. The entire battalion, except for our C Compa
ny, would deploy to a ridge line (in Libya, a feature perhaps ten to fifteen yards above the surrounding desert) and take up a fully prepared defensive position in anticipation of an attack by the Fantasians from the south. C Company would be the enemy force. Everyone was to deploy to their start exercise positions by last light that day; however, no vehicle traffic would be permitted forward of our positions prior to two hours before first light two days from that time. Presumably the commanding officer wanted to give his battalion a full forty-eight hours to prepare an elaborate defensive position. We would use that time to prepare our company for the attack. Unfortunately, we would start our advance some twenty miles south of the battalion’s defensive position, so we would have a long “advance to contact” in some very unreliable vehicles, particularly the APCs.

  With the sun blocked out by the dust created by over one hundred vehicles moving in two different directions deep into the Libyan desert, we set off on a slow thirty-mile move to our “enemy” start position, arriving just after last light. As our role was to be an aggressive enemy in about thirty-six hours, we had lots of time for vehicle maintenance, rehearsals and even rest. Once battle was joined, there would be precious little sleep for at least seventy-two hours, so putting a few hours of shut-eye in the bank would prove useful.

  It was around midday, sixteen hours after we had arrived in our position, that the penny dropped. I recalled that during the orders launching the exercise, the commanding officer had said, “There will be no vehicle traffic forward of the main and enemy forces before two hours prior to first light two days from now.” That “now” meant none prior to two hours before first light the following day, when we were scheduled to begin our advance.

  I rushed over to see Major Tarver and blurted out, “I know the idea was that there would be no contact between us and our objective, the battalion’s defensive position, until tomorrow, but the colonel only restricted vehicle traffic! Why don’t I take a small foot patrol, say five plus myself, and we’ll cover the twenty miles tonight? If we have the time, we’ll get as close as possible to their defensive position, watch their final preparations and identify their layout. You and the rest of the company can pick us up just before your attack, and we can guide you to the weak points in their defence.” If I remember correctly, all Major Tarver said was “Go!”

  I asked for volunteers and was impressed that I soon had more than I needed. There was the attraction of perhaps outwitting the soldiers in the rest of the battalion, and earning some bragging rights. I picked five lance corporals, the rank indicating soldiers who did not have all the formal qualifications to be corporals but who had been identified as future leaders in the battalion. As a rule they were all extremely fit, keen and confident.

  The rehearsal was short and sweet. We broke ourselves into two groups of three, lightened our load to nothing but personal weapons, ammunition and all the water we could reasonably carry, plus two radios and two compasses. According to the map, we would be proceeding almost due north. When I took a bearing I was delighted to see that we would be heading one finger to the west of the North Star, which made navigation pretty simple. Our objective would be a fairly long, prominent rocky outcrop at least fifteen yards high, less than three hundred yards directly south of the battalion position. We would aim for the centre of it, so if we were off by a hundred yards after a twenty-mile march we would still bump into it, or at least see it.

  We didn’t strike off until dark in case the battalion had realized the loophole in the restriction on vehicle traffic and had sent a foot patrol south to watch us. The going was difficult, primarily because our move south had taken us to the edge of Libya’s Sand Sea. We were now marching over a combination of a real sandy desert and rocky outcrops.

  About two hours into our patrol I could hear firing off to our left, perhaps a little less than a half-mile away. As it got closer, I noticed tracer fire disappearing to our right. I recognized the characteristic sound of the coaxial machine gun on the British Chieftain tank. The coaxial machine gun helps the main 120 mm gun strike its target, so if there was a lot of coaxial fire the main-gun shells would not be far behind. We went to ground and hugged the sand like only infanteers under fire can, staying in that position for at least a half an hour while a British armoured regiment, the Scots Greys, conducted a live-fire exercise with my small band of brothers in the target area!

  It was then I realized why our exercise vehicle traffic had been restricted until first light the following day. The exercise organizers who coordinated the allocation of training areas had placed the restriction to ensure that no one would be in the target area for the live-fire exercise conducted that night by the Scots Greys. Unfortunately for us, they hadn’t anticipated that anyone would be foolish enough to march the twenty miles between our battalion’s two positions.

  Regrettably, when we went to ground, the leader of our other group of three twisted his ankle and broke the glass face of his compass. Once the firing stopped, we decided he was in no condition to continue. I knew that the rest of the company would pass this exact point in about eight hours on the way to our first-light attack. I said, “The three of you stay here; you have lots of water and the frequencies of the company radios, so as they approach you in the dark around 0500 hours—and you’ll hear them miles away—make radio contact and use the red filter on your flashlight to get their attention. The three of us will carry on. With any luck, we’ll see you early tomorrow on the objective!”

  It wasn’t easy leaving half our patrol behind, but there was no way I was going to leave the injured corporal by himself, and I was confident they would be easily spotted by the hundred-man company and the twenty armoured vehicles as they made their way to our objective early the next morning.

  The march became a boring, routine grind, which everyone in the infantry is used to. One foot in front of the other, two steps forward and one back in deep sand, and ankle-twisting pain on the rocky outcrops. The further north we got, the harder the desert floor became, which was a blessing. With the North Star to guide us, it was easy to doze off while marching (yet another infantry “skill”), but within seconds, tripping over a stone or stepping into a soft sandy area would jar us awake again. We carried on that way for another eight hours, when we calculated by the number of paces we’d covered that we were a mile or so from our objective. Two of us had carried fifteen small stones in our pocket, and the third corporal carried ten. At every thousand paces, one of us would throw away a stone. I was the last to throw away his stones; when I had only two left, we knew we were close to our little ridge line in front of the enemy position. (Today’s soldiers use Global Positioning Systems, or GPS; any of them who are reading this, stop laughing now!)

  In about ten minutes we could make out a jagged, rocky ridge line silhouetted in the bright moonlight to our immediate front. I was amazed that we were within a hundred yards of the centre of our objective after twenty miles on the march. The ease of navigation, thanks to having the static North Star as a beacon, obviously helped.

  When we reached the base of the ridge we found it relatively easy to scale its nearly vertical wall because it had stony projections that stuck out like steps and that were easy to grab. I was concerned that when we reached the top we too would be silhouetted, and that with the bright moonlight we would be easy to detect from the battalion defensive position, which was supposed to be a mere few hundred yards to our front. I went first, and as I reached the top I eased my head over the top next to a boulder so that I wouldn’t be so visible and looked around. Less than five yards to my right was proof that there is a patron saint for soldiers. There, waiting for its new occupants, was a perfectly constructed circular stone wall protecting a depression that had been chipped in the lava. Its appearance suggested that it had probably been constructed as an observation post during the Second World War’s North African campaign. The three of us moved to the right and slithered into our new home from the rear.

  As we peered through the gap
s between the stones, we couldn’t believe our good fortune. There on the horizon, a few hundred yards to the front, were at least two hundred soldiers constructing fire positions by piling stones around depressions in the rock. They had obviously found it impossible to dig in, so they were using the same techniques used by generations of soldiers before them in this inhospitable landscape. If those soldiers were from two of the unit’s three rifle companies, the remaining one had to be somewhere. It didn’t take us long to find it; it was right below us on the desert floor, laying a massive minefield. The defenders had obviously decided that the minefield would cause our company to attack them from a flank, which determined the way the two rifle companies on the ridge line were facing, east and west.

  An hour later the sun inched its way from behind the horizon and a sand-induced, bright-orange glow illuminated the area to our front. The minefield had been completed, and we watched with satisfaction as the soldiers withdrew through the ten-yard gap they had left in the minefield, the last one through connecting the wire from each side of the gap and on the wire hanging a number of triangular signs that read “MINES.” To anyone coming upon the minefield from the south, like our attacking company, it would appear to be a solid minefield in front of the entire battalion, and thus any attack would have to be mounted from a flank.

  While we were intently watching the preparations to our front, I heard a noise directly behind us. I turned around, and there was our other three-man team. “What the hell!” I whispered.

  The corporal with the twisted ankle replied, “Well, Sir, ten minutes after you left I decided I could limp the rest of the way, heading just left of the North Star. We got here half an hour ago and hit the far end of this ridge and, like you, found a prepared trench. Did you notice the big gap they left in the minefield?”