by Shaun Clarke
‘I don’t want a lorry, Sergeant. I want a bit of fun in my life and this car’s just the ticket.’
‘You’re the boss, but don’t ask me to approve. Be it on your own head.’
‘Oh, stop being so po-faced, Sergeant McGee. The Lancia will be perfectly fine, and that’s what I’m travelling in.’
Lewes was wrong. The Lancia was, at least initially, a disaster. Everything was fine and dandy as they raced across the perfectly smooth, hard sand of the vast desert plain, but as soon as they reached an area of soft sand and gravel, the Lancia began bogging down and had to be dug out.
Though clearly infuriated, as his purple face showed, Sergeant McGee said nothing, other than to snap orders at his men as they slaved and sweated at this murderous task. Lewes, highly embarrassed, avoided his sergeant’s steely gaze and concentrated on his map-reading. But when, a couple of hours later, they had to pass through an area of rippling sand dunes and the car bogged down three times over a distance of ten miles, Sergeant McGee’s steely gaze had turned white-hot and was burning through the back of Lewes’s neck.
‘Don’t say, “I told you so”,’ Lewes finally said to break the chilling silence.
‘No, sir,’ McGee replied. ‘I won’t say I told you so.’
‘I was wrong, Sergeant. My fault. I apologize. I should have bowed to superior experience and not let my schoolboy’s love of sporty-looking cars blind me to reason.’
McGee sighed, smiled a little, and stroked the bonnet of the Lancia as it was pushed by some troopers off the last of the sand mats and steel channels, back onto hard ground. ‘I must admit, it’s a beauty,’ he confessed. ‘It’s just in the wrong place.’
Relieved, Lewes ordered the resting men back into their vehicles, then the convoy took off again, heading across a mercifully flat, hard plain, into the deepening crimson light of dusk. By last light they were well on the road to El Agheila – at least halfway, according to Lewes’s calculations – so they made camp for the night, first erecting triangular poncho shelters between the vehicles and the ground, then lighting fires to cook up hot food.
‘What about Axis aircraft?’ Lewes asked McGee, who was now more friendly towards him. ‘Won’t they see our fires?’
‘They’ll see them all right,’ McGee replied, automatically looking up at the vast, magnificent, star-filled sky, ‘but being out here, they’ll assume we’re a bunch of Arab nomads. No need for concern there.’
Apart from the usual whining mosquitoes, fat flies and innumerable creepy-crawlies, the night passed uneventfully. By first light the men were all up to have a quick breakfast, clear away all signs of the camp, and hit the road while the heat was still bearable.
The first couple of hours were painless, with the forward momentum of the vehicles creating a cooling wind. Also the men’s mouths and nostrils were protected from the billowing sand by the fluttering shemaghs wrapped around their faces, leaving only their eyes exposed. By eleven, however, the sun was high in the sky and not even the beating, snapping wind could counter the fierce, draining heat.
Just after noon, when the column had managed to advance half the remaining distance to El Agheila without a vehicle bogging down – not even the Lancia – a great dark wall formed on the horizon directly in front of them. McGee, still sitting in the rear of the Lancia, leaned forward to tap Tom Boy on the shoulder and tell him to stop. As the driver was braking carefully to avoid becoming bogged down, McGee stood up in the back and signalled with his right hand for the rest of the column to stop too.
‘What is it?’ Lewes asked.
‘See that big dark wall on the horizon?’ McGee asked by way of reply.
‘Yes.’
‘Now listen. What do you hear?’
Listening, Lewes heard what sounded like a train emerging from a tunnel and approaching rapidly.
‘Sandstorm!’ McGee bawled. ‘Everybody take cover!’
The more experienced LRDG men were out of their vehicles so fast that they took the SAS men by surprise. Certainly McGee was out of the Lancia, huddled on the ground beside it and unrolling his poncho even as Lewes was still putting his feet down. Glancing back over his shoulder, Lewes saw that great wall of darkness growing larger as it advanced, blotting out the whole horizon, making the desert floor shake dramatically, and now sounding even more like an approaching train. The sun was gradually obscured by great spirals of sand and eventually disappeared altogether, leaving darkness almost as deep as night.
The oxygen seemed to go out of the air and the flies were swarming and buzzing like crazy things. Lewes could hardly breathe. ‘Get down here!’ McGee shouted, waving him down as sand suddenly swirled howling around the captain.
When Lewes dropped down beside McGee, the burly sergeant threw his poncho over both of them and told him to hold his corner down tightly. Lewes did so just as the sandstorm, travelling at nearly 50mph, swept over the Lancia with a mighty roar, tearing and punching at the poncho, making the car rock dangerously, sucking all the air out of the enclosed space beneath the poncho, and blowing the sand in through every opening, no matter how slight.
Lewes’s throat went dry and he had great difficulty in breathing. The roaring wind was deafening and filled his ears with stabbing pains. For a moment he felt that he was going to be picked up bodily and carried off by the storm. In the event, he escaped this fate.
The sandstorm took only minutes to pass on, but it seemed more like hours. Eventually, however, the noise and the wind abated, the sand settled down and the suffocating heat was replaced with breathable air. When McGee tugged the poncho away to let Lewes look out again, he saw the sandstorm racing towards the southern horizon, now very far away, growing smaller as it rapidly receded. The sun was reappearing in the sky as the swirling sand settled down.
‘Christ!’ Lewes said softly.
‘Your first one?’
‘Yes.’
McGee grinned. ‘The first one always comes as a shock. Now look at your Lancia!’
Completely buried, the car resembled a small sand dune. This time, however, most of the Chevrolets had suffered exactly the same fate.
‘Oh, God!’ Lewes groaned in exasperation. ‘We’re going to have to dig this lot out.’
‘’Fraid so.’
After dusting themselves down, the troopers and LRDG men set above scraping the sand off the trucks with their bare hands. They had to do this before they could even get at the spades and shovels, buried with the rest of their kit. Once they had regained those, they were able to remove the sand more quickly, though it still took some time and, in the ferocious heat of noon, made them all sweat like pigs. Two of them were rendered nauseous by the heat and threw up in the sand. The digging took nearly two hours and was punctuated by a series of five-minute breaks to avoid further such problems. Even then, when the vehicles were cleared, they had to be pushed out with the aid of sand mats and steel channels. By the time they were ready to set off again, most of the men were exhausted.
‘Do you think they’ll be fit enough for the raid tonight?’ McGee asked Lewes, obviously referring only to his SAS troopers, not to the more experienced LRDG.
‘Yes,’ Lewes replied without hesitation. ‘They’ll get their strength back just sitting in the lorries for the rest of the journey. We’re nearly there, Sergeant, so with luck we should get there without any more problems.’
Luck was with them at last. The rest of the journey passed without incident and by last light they were on the outskirts of El Agheila, with the Gulf of Sirte visible in the distance, beyond the sandy cliffs of the coastline. Their luck then took a turn for the worse once more when, approaching the unguarded airfield under cover of darkness, they found no planes on the runway.
‘Damn!’ Lewes exclaimed softly, lying belly-down on the summit of a low ridge and studying the airfield through his binoculars. ‘There’s not a damned thing down there. Just a few huts and a couple of Kraut and Eyetie soldiers. That isn’t an airfield – it’s just a bloody staging post for p
lanes passing through.’
‘I fear so,’ McGee replied, also studying the empty runway through binoculars. ‘It’s been rumoured that the Axis air forces have begun dispersing their planes to fields where they can be properly guarded. I think that’s happened here – and if that’s the case, the planes won’t be coming back. As you say, this is probably now just a staging post for aircraft that have to land temporarily, probably for refuelling. Apart from that, it’s inoperative. You can tell that by the lack of facilities and the small number of guards. It’s been a wild-goose chase, Captain.’
Lewes rolled onto his back, placed the binoculars on his belly, and gazed up at the stars. ‘Buggered if I’ll have this,’ he said, suddenly sitting upright and hanging the binoculars around his neck. ‘I’m not going to waste my bag of bombs. I want to see them put to good use.’
McGee sat up beside him. ‘What does that mean, Captain?’
‘According to our intelligence reports, there’s a building not far from here, in Mersa Brega, where the German top brass regularly conduct intelligence meetings. I’m going to find that building, Sergeant, and blow it to hell.’
‘That’s taking a mighty big chance, Captain.’
‘That’s what life’s all about. Are you with me?’
McGee shrugged. ‘Why not?’
The men, many of whom were as disappointed as Lewes, were ordered back into the vehicles and followed the Lancia away from the airfield, heading back for what was marked on the map as an Axis MSR. When they reached the road, which was certainly wide enough for heavy-duty military traffic and raised a few feet above the desert floor, they parked a good way from it, hidden in the darkness at the bottom of the sloping ground. While waiting, the men ate their wads and drank hot tea from vacuum flasks. When a sizeable German convoy rolled past on the road above, they hurriedly packed away their remaining wads and the vacuum flasks, started up the engines and followed the Lancia up onto the road.
With a daring that took even Sergeant McGee’s breath away, Lewes urged Tom Boy to drive faster until he had caught up with the tail of the German column, where he insisted that he remain for as long as possible. In fact, they stuck to the tail of the column, with their own column of LRDG lorries strung out behind them, until the convoy reached Mersa Brega.
If any of the men in the German column looked back, they must have assumed, in the darkness, that the Lancia and the lorries behind it were their own.
‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Captain,’ Sergeant McGee said, his eyes never moving from the back of the German lorry directly ahead. ‘Apart from your unfortunate choice of cars, you’re a cool-headed officer.’
‘I try to be,’ Lewes replied.
Eventually the German convoy reached a fenced compound, beyond which was a single large brick building and a vehicle park. The first vehicles in the column slowed down, stopped, then started moving into the compound one by one, passing heavily armed guards.
‘This must be the place we want,’ Lewes said. ‘It wouldn’t be so well guarded otherwise.’
‘Are we going in?’ McGee asked in disbelief.
‘We can try. We won’t be noticed until we reach the guardhouse. The second we get there, we open fire with our small arms, picking off the sentries, then race into the compound with the rest behind us. We can shoot up the building as we approach it and then bomb it to hell.’
‘Christ!’ McGee said, though he grinned with pleasurable anticipation and unslung his tommy-gun from his shoulder. ‘Did you get all that, Tom Boy?’ he asked the driver.
‘Yes, sir!’ Corporal Cook replied. ‘The minute we get to the guardhouse, I put my foot down.’
‘Make sure you do, Tom Boy.’
In fact, the Italian sentry at the guardhouse recognized the British markings on the Lancia just before it reached the open gates. He bellowed a warning and lowered his rifle as the siren on the guardhouse started to wail. Tom Boy instantly put his foot down and roared towards the gate, hard on the tail of the German lorry that had just passed through.
Meanwhile Lewes unholstered his Browning High Power handgun and put two bullets into the sentry. The impact threw the Italian backwards into the wall. As the Lancia swept past the guardhouse, Lewes emptied the handgun into it, in the hope of cutting down the other sentry.
Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw the other LRDG lorries racing between the open gates, one after the other, with some of the men also firing at the guardhouse with their semi-automatic weapons, causing showers of wood splinters to fly off it and almost certainly killing anyone still inside.
Tom Boy braked sharply, going into a skid, when he saw that the German lorries up ahead had stopped and were disgorging their heavily armed soldiers. As the Lancia skidded to a halt, the LRDG lorries coming up behind spread out around it and also slid to a standstill, allowing the SAS troopers to pour out, already firing their small arms at the advancing Axis soldiers.
‘Damn!’ Lewes rasped, hauling the bag of bombs onto his lap and looking ahead at the Axis soldiers fanning out across the compound and blocking the way to the brick building. ‘We’ll never get past them.’ He glanced sideways at the parking area, which was filled with dusty troop lorries and gleaming staff cars. Bullets zipped past his head in both directions, being fired simultaneously by his SAS troopers and that formidable mixture of Germans and Italians. ‘So!’ he said. ‘If we can’t blow up the building, we’ll destroy as many vehicles as possible. Come on, Sergeant, let’s go.’
He jumped out of the Lancia, still holding the bag of bombs. McGee did the same, then hurried around the back of the car to join Lewes, who was rummaging about in the bag, taking out as many of the small bombs as he could carry. He then handed the heavy bag to McGee. ‘Distribute these to some of the other men and tell the remainder to keep those soldiers away from us.’ He had to shout above the general bedlam, to which was suddenly added the sharp roar of Tom Boy’s Sten gun, which the driver was firing from the front seat of the Lancia.
Glancing at the Axis troops, Lewes saw some of them dropping, but the others were still returning the SAS fire while gradually spreading out across the compound.
‘We’re going to have to be quick,’ McGee said.
‘Then get going, Sergeant!’
While the SAS troopers kept the Axis soldiers busy, Lewes ran towards the parking area. By the time he reached it, McGee had distributed the Lewes bombs and the troops armed with them were running forward to join Lewes. They spread out, planting bombs on lorries and staff cars alike, and managed to complete the job before the enemy troops could head in their direction.
As each man planted the last of his bombs, he ran back to rejoin his own lorry and add his firing to the increasingly ferocious barrage aimed at the enemy.
One SAS trooper fell, then another, and a third. The Axis troops were falling at a greater rate, but that was not encouraging. Leaving their dead where they were lying, the SAS men backed towards their own lorries, firing as they retreated, and scrambled up into them. The last men were still hauling themselves up, or being hauled up, as the lorries turned around on screeching tyres and raced out of the compound.
The time fuses on the Lewes bombs had been set for the minimum delay of ten minutes. As the last of the LRDG trucks roared out of the compound, Lewes glanced sideways from the Lancia, out on lead, and saw the Axis troops hurrying towards the parking area to remove the bombs.
Lewes crossed his fingers.
The first lorry to explode did so with a thunderous noise just as the enemy troops were approaching. It went up in smoke and flames, blowing apart, spewing metal, forcing the Axis troops to throw themselves to the ground or beat a hasty retreat. The lorry was followed by a staff car, then another lorry, then another, until the area had become a spectacular inferno of vivid-yellow flames, black, boiling smoke, melting rubber and flying, spinning, red-hot metal.
The Axis troops could do nothing but watch the continuing destruction – so shocked that they made no attempt to
pursue the men who had caused it.
As he raced away in his Lancia, Lewes looked back with pride, counting ten, twenty, then thirty Axis vehicles either destroyed completely or seriously damaged.
‘That makes up for a lot,’ McGee said.
Lewes heard cheering from the SAS troopers in the trucks behind him. He uncrossed his fingers and stuck his thumb up in the air as the lorries headed back to Jalo Oasis, over 120 miles away, beyond the moonlit horizon.
14
Lieutenant Greaves was scheduled to raid Agedabia airfield just before the Oasis Force’s advance, due to start on Tuesday 20 December. Brigadier Reid and his staff had worked out that by Wednesday the Force would be nearing the area of regular Axis air patrols. Therefore anything Greaves could do to hamper these, particularly by destroying enemy aircraft, would be of invaluable help to the campaign.
‘We can’t make that advance if the number of Axis planes aren’t greatly reduced,’ he said. ‘That’s the job of L Detachment, Lieutenant, and failure isn’t acceptable.’
Greaves left Jalo Oasis with only two of his own men, Corporal ‘Taff’ Clayton and Private Neil Moffatt, a few hours before Stirling returned. The group, driven by an LRDG private, Bob Purbridge, had a reasonably uneventful journey to Agedabia, with only a couple of punctures to contend with; and each mile that took them closer to their target was also, Greaves suddenly realized, taking him back to where he had been before meeting Stirling: in that great Allied camp located just outside Mersa Brega in the vast desert of Cyrenaica.
That had only been seven months ago, but it seemed more like seven years. Three days after Greaves had been casevacked from Tobruk, Rommel’s Panzer divisions had cut off the port. Seventeen days after that, while Greaves was recovering from surgery in the Scottish Military Hospital in Alexandria, German troops had occupied Halfaya Pass and the British had been forced to retire across the border into Egypt. A month later, when the British attempted to take the Pass back with Operation Brevity, they were defeated again.
