12th December – During the night enemy columns passed close to the Column’s leaguer. Lieut. McCormick had broken down within a mile or two at dark (he even returned once to the leaguer to collect M.T. spares and had gone out again). He and his crew bedded down where they were, intending to come in in the morning, but they were never seen again and were later reported prisoners of war.
In his memoir, David elaborates on this episode in far more vivid and detailed terms. It was yet another example of the rapidly changing fortunes of war, for David was to find himself both captor and captive within a matter of minutes. At this stage in the fighting, the Germans were being pushed back from Tobruk, and on the day in question, David’s unit had advanced some 100 miles westwards in order to attack the enemy’s communications. They had managed to destroy a number of German supply vehicles which, in David’s words, ‘fled first to the right and then to the left in a vain attempt to avoid our shells, like frightened sheep being rounded up by a sheepdog’.
By evening, however, it was decided that David’s unit had advanced too far behind enemy lines and needed to withdraw some 10 miles, with David at the rear with instructions to pick up any ‘stragglers’, on this occasion an ammunition lorry which had suffered a petrol stoppage. Once the problem had been fixed, David and his party set off back to the leaguer; however ahead of them at one point was what, on first sight, appeared to be a patch of white sand; this turned out to be a pool of water, in which the ammunition truck foundered. David and his men were unable to pull it free without further assistance, and he radioed back to his unit to explain his predicament, eventually receiving orders to return to the leaguer in the smaller lorry, which he managed to do in the dark with some difficulty. It was decided that he should then return to the bogged down ammunition lorry with a spare gun-tower, and make another attempt to free it. It took until 3 a.m. for David and his team to unload the ammunition onto firmer ground and eventually pull out the beleaguered lorry. Finding their way back to their unit a second time, however, proved even more difficult, largely because the magnetic compass David was using to take bearings was variously affected by the different vehicles in which he made each journey. Unable to find the leaguer, he and his men received radioed instructions to stay where they were for what remained of the night, and rejoin the column at first light.
It was now 4 a.m., so David told his men to get some rest whilst he himself waited up in the front of his car. Half an hour later, he became aware of the rumbling of an approaching enemy column. Being already lost and not knowing in which direction to move, David decided that he and his men should stay put and hope the column would pass by without spotting them.
Just then, however, a small car appeared out of the night, and stopped some 20 yards away, its occupants peering at them intently. David’s memoir continues:
I walked over to it, and looking through the window asked, ‘Sind Sie Deutsch?’ in my best German. The answer was something quite incomprehensible; so I drew out my revolver from under my greatcoat and waggled it at them. Three Italian officers and their drivers hurriedly jumped out with their hands above their heads, and my men came over and relieved them of their weapons. They looked very frightened and one produced a bottle of cognac to pacify us.
The rumbling of the enemy column was growing ever louder, so David decided that it would be prudent to move after all, taking with them their new prisoners, who he considered to be of possible use to Allied Intelligence. Finding room for them all was the first problem, but by distributing the Italians amongst David’s vehicles and commandeering the Italian car, it seemed just feasible. Unfortunately, at the very moment that one of David’s men was trying to start the Italian car, a bright moon broke through the clouds, revealing two enemy columns, one to the north and one to the south of David’s little party. Three vehicles were rapidly bearing down on them, and the tables were about to be turned. This is how he described the actual moment of his capture, for which he later blamed himself:
I have often thought that if I had thought quickly enough and we had run to our cars, we could have started up by the time the cars reached us, and dashed off into the desert with a good chance of escaping and rejoining our column sometime during the day. But tired as I was, and not knowing which direction to take, I stood hypnotised by the situation during those vital seconds quite unable to make any decision at all.
The lorries stopped. Each contained about fifty soldiers, sitting half asleep with blankets round their shoulders. From the leading lorry stepped a tall Italian captain with a bandage round his head. He spoke to the former prisoners, then turning to me asked, in good French, how many men I had with me. I told him there were seven of us. He told me that we were entirely surrounded by thousands of Italians and Germans, and that we had the choice of surrendering or fleeing. If we chose to surrender we would be well-treated, we would go to Italy where we would have wonderful food, sunshine, and live in a beautiful villa for the rest of the war; we could keep all our personal possessions. If we attempted to flee, he could not guarantee that we would not all get shot. I told him I would consult my men. Six of us, including myself, thought we were in the bag; the seventh, a Londoner … who had recently joined the regiment, suggested that I put them all in the bag. I told the captain that we were his prisoners and handed him the butt of my revolver. He said I had made a wise decision, and that we were very fortunate, for ‘for us the war was over’. ‘For us’ our troubles were just beginning, and I think we all realised the fact.
Thus began David’s uncomfortable and frequently perilous journey to an indeterminate period of captivity in Italy. The Italian soldiers, by now fully awake, immediately started looting the British vehicles until ordered to stop by the Captain, but not in time to save David’s first significant loss, ‘my treasured box of chocolates, which I had ordered a month before, and which had arrived on the previous day’. His memoir continues:
I was told to get in the front of my own car. The Captain got in the driving seat, my men were put in one of the Italian lorries, and the whole column slowly turned round and set off in the direction whence it had come … The Captain was full of admiration for the Ford pick-up, and I couldn’t help telling him how to drive it properly when he made mistakes. It seemed a crime to see a car so abused. He asked me if there were many British in the neighbourhood and if I thought there would be a battle the next day. I told him there were thousands of British all round and he would almost certainly be dead by this time tomorrow. He swallowed once or twice but said nothing.
The Italian column with its new prisoners eventually came to a halt between two groups of small guns, and almost immediately came under fire from two British armoured cars that had appeared out of the half-light. The Italian captain leapt out and fell flat on his face, ordering David to do likewise. As shells fell all round them, David’s reaction was understandable: ‘As I lay on the ground … I felt quite appalled at the idea of being hit by my own people.’
Once the firing was directed further down the line, David was ordered back into his car, and the captain drove back at high speed through the Italian lines, all the while leaning out of the window and exhorting the Italian gunners to stay at their guns. David’s memoir continues:
A small car full of officers dashed past us in a panic, blowing its horn and shouting at a few lorries to get out of its way. It appeared that the great advantage of being an officer in the Italian army was that you had a faster car and could get out of the way of danger quicker.
Once safely out of the firing line, David was ordered into a small car with three Italian officers who were instructed to take him to the Italian Commandant. For several hours he was driven round in a half-hearted manner, with frequent stops, until some Allied 25-pdr shells landed in the vicinity. At this point the search for the commandant was abandoned, and David was returned to his men, whom he now found sitting in a lorry below an escarpment.
The little band of British prisoners was by now in the hands of a new gro
up of Italians. There seemed to be only one officer in charge, whom David described as follows:
He was a huge good-looking man, who reminded one of the hero of some Hollywood military film. He managed somehow to keep himself looking smart, providing a marked contrast to the others, whose appearance was little or no better than that of a gang of beggars or gypsies. He seemed to be in charge of all the Italians within a radius of about a square mile, including fifteen midget tanks, several guns, and a horde of infantry, which he ruled by yelling and gesticulating at them, and, when this produced no effect, which it never did, by going round kicking them with his beautifully polished riding boots.
As the day progressed, David’s contempt for his captors intensified. Shells were still falling intermittently in their midst, causing the Italian lieutenant to move his ‘mixed flock’ further along the escarpment accordingly:
Then ensued all the usual yelling, arm-waving, and kicking. Tanks and lorries were started up, guns were fastened onto the rear of the lorries, the infantry all clambered in, and the whole cavalcade moved about two hundred yards along the base of the escarpment. Then more yelling and kicking, and out they all got again, each man with his wretched rifle and spade, each man to choose his own position, which was usually in some natural hole or gully … where he could get no view of the enemy, and would be useless in the event of an attack, but felt fairly protected from shells or bombs. They all dug themselves little troughs, and collected boulders and rocks, which they lay round their edges, giving the impression of gardeners making little rock gardens round little pools. But instead of pouring water in the troughs they lay in them themselves until the next time they would be kicked out for a new move. They were completely apathetic.
It seems that one of the missing elements of David’s military training was instructions on what to do with his personal possessions in the event of capture. By now he and his men were under the immediate control of a sergeant who clearly hungered after David’s field-glasses, which were still hanging round his neck under his great-coat. With the benefit of hindsight, David described what he should have done next:
I know now that I should have smashed them as soon as I got an opportunity, but capture was a thing I had never anticipated or thought of, and I had no idea of the correct drill. If I was ever to be captured again I should now know exactly what to do. I should first arm myself with detailed information of all the news of military and general value for the benefit of older prisoners of war, who I should later join, then have the biggest meal of my life, put on all my best and newest clothes, including two sets of shirts and underclothes, fill my pockets with spare socks and toilet kit, and have cans of petrol handy to throw over every other piece of army and personal equipment and be set alight. As it was I was foolish enough to believe that I really was going to be allowed to keep my personal kit, as I had been promised, and apart from tearing up a few notes and maps, which I thought might prove of interest to the enemy, I destroyed nothing, even being short-sighted enough to change into a very worn pair of boots and socks instead of the good ones that I was wearing.
The Italian sergeant kept pestering David for his binoculars, at one point telling him that his commanding officer had ordered David to hand them over. David countered by saying he would do so only if the officer gave the order in person. After much sulking on the part of the Sergeant, a compromise was reached whereby David agreed that when he and his men were handed on to someone else he would give the sergeant his binoculars, provided that in the meantime the latter had done everything he could for the little group of prisoners: ‘From then on he was quite subservient, fetching bread and water for us, allowing me to fetch some rice porridge and condensed milk from my car … and allowing us to get out of the truck and cook it.’
A crowd of Italian soldiers now gathered round, intrigued by such proceedings. David soon realised that they did no cooking for themselves, but relied on one hot meal a day brought round in a truck, consisting of a soup of vegetables and macaroni; for the rest of the day they made do with dry bread, a tin of inferior bully beef, and water.
That night David slept for the last time in his own camp bed, ‘tucked up by the binocular-struck sergeant’. At this point he experienced a reaction evidently common to many newly captured prisoners of war. Instead of lying awake worrying about the horrors awaiting him, or fretting about how he might have avoided capture, in his memoir he describes how he felt:
That night I slept the sleep of the just … For many weeks I had started the day at 5 a.m., been on the go without time to rest for a proper meal all day, and after dark often had to spend most of my valuable sleeping time groping my way over the desert to some other unit to collect guns, petrol or spares. And of course the previous night we had no sleep at all … Now that I was a prisoner … instead of being miserable and dejected, I felt a great sense of peace and relief, as if all my troubles were over and an overwhelming weight had lifted from my shoulders. I must have gone to sleep at about eight o’clock and slept till after ten the following morning.
David was in for a rude awakening the next day when the reality of his new situation truly dawned on him:
The fact that I was a prisoner really sank home however when Nature called me. I was allowed to go a few yards from the truck to take my trousers down, and one of our guards was instructed to stand almost on top of me with his rifle at the ready.
Later that day David and his men began their journey to the coast in earnest. They were taken by lorry some way westwards through heavily shelled lines to a hollow where David received his first proper interrogation through the medium of an interpreter. His refusal to reveal anything other than his name, rank and number exasperated his interrogator:
[He] went right up in the air and raved against the British so-called sense of honour. It seemed that we thought nothing of bombing hospitals and hospital ships and raping our enemy’s womenfolk, but when asked a simple straightforward question, this sense of honour forbade us to answer.
David next saw the rest of his men being led off to be similarly interrogated, and shouted a reminder to them that they need only state their name, rank and number. Then followed a particularly sinister development:
I was led out of the hollow to rejoin the others, who were paraded in a line with their backs to a group of tough-looking men armed with tommy guns. I was told to stand at the end of the line. The others were all looking a bit green, and the man next to me whispered that he thought they were going to shoot us, a thought that had already occurred to me. An Italian officer came up and asked if we were still determined not to answer their questions, saying that it would be much worse for us is we didn’t. I told him we were, and after he had a short conversation with the men behind us, to our great relief we were ordered to get into a nearby truck.
At this point David and his companions were parted from their personal belongings, which were still in the truck that had carried them to the hollow. David protested in vain to a ‘tough individual in silver braid and stars’ that he had been promised they could keep their kit; the latter replied that he knew all about it, but that their possessions were now his. He then proceeded to search David and relieve him of his binoculars and last cigarettes. David’s memoir continues:
I discovered later that he was a brigadiere, equivalent to a sergeant in our army. I am not a revengeful person by nature, but many were the times later on when I had no socks or toothbrush, or a bad cold and no handkerchief, that I imagined myself shooting that brigadiere.
As night was falling the British prisoners, guarded by three Italian soldiers, were driven off in another small truck filled with motor tyres. Their driver promptly lost his way in the dark, and they were obliged to spend a very uncomfortable night in the truck with no room to stretch out. David recalls in his memoir that to make matters worse, ‘a host of fleas left their Italian hosts, evidently preferring British blood’.
At daybreak the following morning, having had no breakfast, they resumed t
heir journey, stopping after a few hours at a rear headquarters where David was forced to relinquish his cap badge to an Italian officer, about whom David wrote wryly in his memoir: ‘I expect he took it back on his next leave as a souvenir of the British officer who he had captured single-handed.’ The party then continued as far as the main coast road, where they were herded into a small pink hut to await yet another truck. David described his amazement at their new guard’s behaviour, quite unlike that of any soldier he had previously encountered:
[He] was a fine-looking tramp with a black beard, who sang pieces from various operas in a fine tenor for about an hour while we waited. I had never imagined such a soldier in my wildest dreams, but later on I was to discover that he was not such a rarity as I imagined. The Italians are a music loving race, brought up on their famous operas, and even the simplest peasants seem to have a fine knowledge of music. When they are happy they sing, and don’t appear to be the least bit self-conscious about it.
An open-sided truck now transported the prisoners westwards along the coast road, with David sitting in the front beside their driver, ‘a gnarled old peasant in civilian clothes’. During the journey David noted with dismay the number of German and Italian tanks and other transport either moving up to the front or lying hidden from aerial view in the orchards alongside the road: ‘It was apparent to me that the enemy had a great many reserve tanks, which our intelligence knew nothing about.’
Farming, Fighting and Family Page 18
