by Shaun Clarke
‘The bloody English!’ Taff exclaimed. ‘I mean those bastards from the south. I don’t mean the northerners like you – they’re a good-hearted lot – but them Londoners and the like, they all have airs and graces, even if they come from the working class.’
‘Jimbo’s all right.’
‘I’ll give you that. He’s not bad. But that Frankie from Finsbury Park, he thinks he’s cock o’ the walk.’
‘It’s being born in the south, being a Londoner, that makes him that way. He can’t help it.’
‘They’d blunt his tongue in Aberfan,’ Taff replied, ‘if he wagged it as much as he does with us. Still, he’s all right, I reckon.’
‘A good soldier,’ Neil said.
‘That’s why he’s here,’ Taff said. ‘As Jimbo said, L Detachment is the cream de la cream and that makes us somethin’ special, see?’
Receiving no response, he glanced to the side and saw the cigarette fall from Neil’s fingers and drop into the drifting sand. It smouldered there for a minute, the smoke curling upwards, spiralling in front of Neil’s closed eyes before vaporizing. By the time it had gone out, Neil had started snoring.
‘Silly sod!’ Taff whispered, then he too closed his weary eyes and was soon fast asleep.
The third day was taken up with desert survival, including tactics for avoiding dehydration, sunstroke and sunburn; locating and using artesian wells; hunting desert gazelles for food; the correct disposal of garbage and human waste; desert camouflage and the digging of shallow ‘scrapes’ and other lying-up positions; treatment of the bites of poisonous spiders, scorpions and snakes, or illness caused by lice, mites, flies and mosquitoes; using condoms to keep dust out of weapons; constructing a desert still to produce drinkable water from urine; and avoiding drowning when caught in a wadi during a flash flood.
‘Drowning in the desert!’ Frankie laughed. ‘You wouldn’t credit it, would you?’
Though close to serious exhaustion, he was actually in a good mood because he and the others had just about survived the long day and were scheduled to return to Jalo Oasis that evening, when they could have a decent meal in the mess tent, get drunk in their own tents, and have a desperately needed sleep on a real camp-bed.
For that very reason he almost went into a state of shock when told by Wild Bill – while Sergeant Lorrimer smiled sadistically right there beside him – that they would indeed be returning that evening – but they had to do it on foot, navigating in the darkness by themselves.
‘That should get you back to the oasis by first light,’ Wild Bill said. ‘Always assuming, of course, that you don’t get lost.’
Frankie was not the only soldier who almost gave up there and then, but in the event neither he nor any of the other SAS troopers did. Encouraged by those temporarily less exhausted, they began the long march. They managed to keep going and even repaid a debt by encouraging those who had encouraged them and who, suddenly exhausted, were themselves about to give up. All in all, then, they learned to lean on one another until, just before first light, they all finally made it back. They were a sorry sight to behold, but their pride was obvious.
Impressed, Sergeant Lorrimer let them all have a fry-up washed down with cold beer, followed by a shower and a sleep that lasted till noon.
When they were up dressed, they were called to Stirling’s tent, where they were told by the tall, aristocratic captain that the rest of the day was free, but that the following morning they would begin their preparations for the raids against the German airfields.
‘Ready, willing and able,’ Jimbo said.
He spoke for every one of them.
9
Pleased with the report from Sergeant Monnery on the successful training of the SAS troopers in the desert, Captain Stirling left the Jalo Oasis after dawn on Sunday 8 December, a couple of days earlier than originally planned, to raid the airfield at Sirte.
‘I’m anxious to get on with it,’ he explained to Brigadier Reid, ‘because we could be recalled to Cairo any time. There are still too many officers on the GHQ staff who prefer more orthodox methods of warfare and resent what we’re doing out here. They tend to think that L Detachment – and the LRDG as well – are using the guerrilla-warfare tactics of which they so strongly disapprove. In fact, when last I was in Cairo one of those bloody fools told me that this was an ungentlemanly way to fight – one not suited to the forces of the British Empire. That particular officer may be a pompous idiot, but he has many friends.’
‘I agree,’ Reid said as they shared a cup of tea in his big tent near one of the palm-fringed pools of the oasis. Through the open flaps, between the tent and the pool, the trucks of the first patrol, camouflaged pink and green to blend in with the desert, were gathered together, surrounded by the LRDG and SAS men preparing to leave. ‘You’d better get out of here before they stop you – and nothing’s lost if you’re early. Gives you time for a little mistake or two. Time to change your plans if necessary. Are all the patrols leaving today?’
‘No. I want to make the maximum use of surprise, so Captain Lewes will be attacking Agheila airfield the same night as the other patrols hit Sirte.’
‘That’s only half the distance that you have to travel.’
‘Exactly. So although we’re attacking the same night, Lewes won’t be setting out with S Patrol until two days after I leave.’
‘Who’s taking you, David?’
‘S1 Patrol.
‘Commanded by Captain Gus Halliman – a good man.’
‘Indeed.’ Stirling glanced back over his shoulder and saw that the last of the men had taken his place in his Chevrolet. ‘They’re all set to leave,’ Stirling said. ‘I’d best be going.’ He stood up and offered his hand to the brigadier. The two men shook hands.
‘Good luck and God speed,’ Reid said warmly.
‘Thank you, sir,’ Stirling replied, then left the tent, climbed into his designated Chevrolet lorry, and nodded to Captain Halliman, indicating that they could now start the journey. Halliman nodded back, then raised and lowered his right hand. The lorries all roared into life simultaneously, then moved out of the oasis, churning up billowing clouds of sand in their wake. They soon reached the vast open plains of the desert where, with the force of a hammer, the sun’s blazing heat hit them.
Halliman, a big-boned, fair-haired Englishman, led his mainly Rhodesian drivers with the confidence of a man who knew the desert well. In fact, he had served in the Royal Tank Corps before joining the LRDG, but his experience with the latter was considerable and now he was one of their best men. He rode in the leading truck with his navigator, Mike Sadler, another Rhodesian.
Stirling and Captain ‘Paddy’ Callaghan were in the second truck with their nine SAS troopers perched all around them where they could get a footing on the piles of gear. Indeed, each of the seven trucks was close to being overloaded with petrol, water-cans, blankets, camouflage nets, weapons, ammunition, and the seventeen other men of the LRDG. However, the LRDG put great faith in the reinforced springs of their vehicles and so drove on into the dazzling light of the desert with calm confidence.
‘I hope these Rhodesian bastards know where they’re going,’ Jimbo said, not as confident as the drivers appeared to be. ‘I don’t want to be lost in this bleedin’ desert.’
‘I think we’re in safe hands,’ Frankie told him. ‘They seem pretty capable.’
‘I’ll believe it when I see it, my old mate. For now, I’m keeping a tight arse.’
‘I’ll stop holding my nose then.’
The LRDG men worked to a routine that was automatically followed by the SAS troopers. As the day warmed up, they shed the sheepskin jackets that kept out the chill of the early hours. By 1000 hours the sun was well up in the sky, at over 20 degrees, throwing a sharp shadow from the needle of the sun compass so bright that it started to hurt the men’s eyes. An hour later the blasts of warm air on the ridge tops had forced the gunners perched high on each lorry to discard most of their clothes. B
y noon, with the sun almost directly above them and the desert plain had taken on a stark, white lunar quality, the vehicles were halted in the shadow of a steep wadi side where they would not be seen by overflying enemy aircraft.
‘Thank Christ for that,’ Jimbo said as Mike Sadler took a fix on the sun through the smoked glass of his theodolite, the radio operator contacted base for any fresh orders, and the rest of the men lay under the shade of a tarpaulin stretched between two trucks. ‘You could have fried a bloody egg on my head, it was getting so hot.’
‘I feel like gagging in this heat,’ Frankie replied, ‘it dries my throat out so.’
‘Hey, Taff!’ Jimbo called out to the Welshman, who was sitting in the shade of his own truck, smoking. ‘Is that dark stain around your crutch sweat or have you just been tugging it off again?’
Taff stared steadily, sardonically, at Jimbo, then thoughtfully blew a couple of smoke rings and watched them dissolving. ‘At least I’ve got something to tug,’ he said. ‘I have my doubts about you, lad.’
Jimbo grinned. He always enjoyed a good comeback. ‘I’m told the Welsh are very good at singing when they reach the crescendo.’
‘We always climax well,’ Taff responded, ‘and leave the audience gasping.’
‘With horror, no doubt.’
‘On your feet!’ Sergeant Lorrimer roared. ‘Move it! Let’s go!’
‘He can sing even better than you,’ Jimbo said to Taff, as they climbed to their feet with the others.
‘Right,’ Taff said. ‘A heavenly choir. It reverberates endlessly. Well, here we go again.’
By early afternoon they had left Jalo well behind them and were heading for El Agheila, across the perfectly smooth, hard sand of a vast landscape, with the sheer cliffs of the upland plateaux visible beyond the heat haze in the north and alluvial sand dunes, awesomely beautiful, rising and falling to the west. For most of the afternoon the heat was truly appalling, felt particularly on the head even through the black woollen agal and shemagh, but it cooled to more bearable levels in the late afternoon, when Halliman started looking out for a place to laager before last light. By the time he had found a suitable spot, again in a shaded wadi, the patrol had travelled over 90 miles from Jalo. Luckily, the day had been without incident other than the usual punctures, trucks bogged down in soft sand and the minor repairs required after motoring over grit, sand and rock. They had not seen any sign of the enemy; nor had they caught a glimpse of a single Arab.
‘This place is as empty as the far side of the moon,’ Callaghan said to Stirling. ‘We’re the only ones here.’
‘I wouldn’t bet on that,’ Halliman said, climbing down from the lorry. ‘Don’t relax for a second.’
When the vehicles laagered, they parked across the wind. Each driver then pinned the folded tarpaulin by two wheels on the lee side, with the upper half forming a windbreak and the lower a groundsheet. Before resting, however, the LRDG drivers had to check their day’s petrol consumption and make the usual maintenance checks, including water, oil, tyres and the possible clogging of the carburettor with sand. While the drivers were doing this, the SAS were checking and cleaning their weapons with equal thoroughness, even though they had already tried to protect them from the sand by wrapping them, to the accompaniment of many ribald remarks and howls of laughter, in stretched condoms.
Meanwhile, the cooks had a fire going (which almost certainly would be mistaken for an Arab camp fire by Axis aircraft flying overhead) and water on the boil for a brew of tea. When this was ready, the men drank it gratefully, smoked a lot of cigarettes, washed themselves as best they could, trying to get rid of the blend of sweat and sand, and then tucked in enthusiastically to the ‘international cuisine’ dreamt up by the immense Corporal Harrington. It was some kind of bully-beef curry and it wasn’t half bad.
Afterwards the men stretched out under the trucks and tried to sleep as best they could, given that the night was bitterly cold and that the buzzing flies and whining mosquitoes were oblivious to it. You could hardly call it a restful night.
The following morning Captain Stirling received a signal from Jalo stating that the main battle was static, with Rommel at Gazala and the Eighth Army reorganizing for a further advance. Now even more confident that they were doing the right thing, he passed the news on to Halliman, who, over the next two days, moved the patrol steadily north-westwards towards Sirte.
Just before the midday halt on the third day, approximately 65 miles south of Sirte, an Italian Gibli fighter plane, lightly armed but highly manœuvrable, appeared seemingly out of nowhere, its wings glinting like silver in the clear blue sky.
It banked to begin its attack descent.
‘Damn!’ Stirling exclaimed. ‘That blighter could radio our position back to his HQ.’
‘He could also blow us to Kingdom Come,’ Halliman replied, glancing back at the rest of his column, which was crossing a rocky stretch of desert at a mere 6 mph with no shelter in sight. ‘That’s all I need to know.’ He turned to his black-bearded Rhodesian gunner and snapped, ‘Open fire!’
The Boyes anti-tank rifle roared into life, firing a hail of bullets and tracer at the Gibli as it barrelled down out of the azure sky, its own machine-guns hammering as it dived and making the sand spit in long, jagged lines that snaked towards the slow-moving vehicles. The other LRDG gunners also opened fire, but failed to hit the plane as it dropped its two bombs. It levelled out, roared very low overhead and ascended again, just as the bombs exploded with a deafening roar.
Sand and soil erupted in mushrooming smoke to the east of the column, showering the men as it rained back down again. The Italian plane flew off and disappeared into the heat haze as the exploded sand and soil settled, some of it still smouldering, and the black smoke trailed away, revealing two enormous charred holes in the desert plain’s bleached white surface, mere yards from the trucks, which continued to move forward, untouched.
‘Close one,’ Stirling said.
‘We didn’t hit that bastard,’ Halliman reminded the others, ‘and he’s flown back to his base. Before very long, his friends will come back to look for us. We’d better go into hiding.’ He turned around in the lorry and raised his right hand, indicating ‘Stop’. Then, when the other drivers had come to a halt, he swung the same hand out from the hip and back in again, indicating ‘Follow me’. He then told his Rhodesian driver to backtrack to where he had seen a patch of scrub that could be the basis for a camouflaged position. When they arrived there and Halliman could survey the area properly, he realized that there was not enough scrub to camouflage the vehicles but just enough, in combination with the camouflage nets, to give decent cover.
Turning to Wild Bill Monnery, he said: ‘Sergeant, tell the men to form a laager inside this area of scrub and then fling their cam nets over the vehicles and move well clear of them. Also, get some of the men to hike out to where we were and erase all signs of our tracks from our main route to here. There’s no point in trying to fight off an air attack, as any machine-gun fire will only draw attention to the vehicles hidden under the netting. So tell the men to simply lie low until the enemy planes have come and gone. Then we’ll move on.’
When Monnery conveyed Halliman’s orders to the men, they did as they were told, the drivers forming a tight laager close to the scrub, other men covering the trucks with camouflage nets, and some of them hiking back out to where they had been attacked, to erase the tracks of the trucks by brushing the sand over them as they made their way back to the laager.
With their woven shreds of desert-coloured hessian, the nets blended perfectly with the surrounding shrub, making the lorries practically invisible from the air. The vehicles’ tracks, though trailing back across the desert where the column had come from, stopped dead where the column had been attacked. From the air it would now be difficult to know where the column had gone.
Still in their parked vehicles, almost suffocating under the heavy camouflage nets, the men waited for the Italian airc
raft to arrive. No one spoke. The tension was contagious. Eventually, after what seemed like hours, but was in fact forty minutes, three Italian bombers flew overhead, searching for the tracks of the vehicles. They found only the tracks well away from the patch of scrub and turned back to strafe that area and also drop a number of small bombs. The explosions, when they came, were both noisy and spectacular, great mushrooms of sand, soil and smoke, but they destroyed nothing more than the desert’s formerly unblemished surface.
‘My compliments,’ Stirling whispered to Halliman. ‘That was a good idea.’
Halliman just grinned.
Once the clouds of sand and dust had settled, the Italian aircraft departed and the men picked themselves up and went back to their vehicles. No one was hurt and no damage had been done – not even a tyre punctured – so the men settled down to a lunch of wads and tinned fruit. The latter, in particular, drove the flies and mosquitoes into a frenzy of buzzing and whining.
‘We’ll move off again at 1400 hours,’ Halliman told Stirling and Paddy Callaghan as they had their meagre lunch in the shade of the former’s Chevrolet. ‘We intend dropping you and your men off at a point about three miles from Sirte and approximately the same distance from the coast road – far closer to Axis traffic than we’d normally take vehicles when on reconnaissance. We should be there by midnight.’
‘You’ve done a damned good job so far,’ Paddy Callaghan said. ‘Very impressive. I must say.’
‘What we do, we do well,’ Halliman replied. ‘I think that’s something you understand.’
‘Absolutely!’ Stirling affirmed.
Halliman grinned. ‘I knew you’d say that. Now it’s time to move on.’
The following five hours were uneventful, other than for the expected difficulties, all of which, combined, doubled the time the same journey would have taken on a decent road and trebled the workload of the already exhausted men.
To add to their frustration, a second Italian fighter plane spotted them just before last light, when they only had 40 miles to go. It swept down unexpectedly, making a dreadful din, to rake the convoy with its machine-guns, then drop its two little bombs. As before, the explosions were catastrophic but well off the mark, creating a spectacle of mushrooming sand, dust and smoke, but doing no damage to the column. Having run out of ammunition, the pilot eventually flew away.
