A Good Clean Fight (72 page)

As for the unpleasantness at the Black Cat Club: I made it up. This is not to say that troops on leave in Cairo never misbehaved. Men of the Special Forces certainly relaxed in their own way. In
Long Range Desert Group
(Collins, 1945), Captain W. B. Kennedy Shaw recalled certain incidents involving that unit “which ended in the Military Police barracks at Bab el Hadid.” For instance, the LRDG was proud of its skill at sand-channeling, the technique of placing steel channels under wheels to extricate a vehicle stuck in soft sand, and one patrol “insisted on sand-channeling their way down the length of Sharia Suleiman Pasha”—a main street in Cairo—“to the fury of the police and the dislocation of the traffic.” There were other incidents (one involved a bath and a lift-shaft) and friction developed when men not in the LRDG were found wearing its shoulder patches because these “were always good for a few free drinks.” I borrowed this act of dangerous larceny and applied it to the white berets of the SAS instead—an item of clothing which did in fact provoke confrontations in Cairo, until Stirling changed its color.

There was no Hornet Squadron in North Africa, but
anonymous airstrips such as LG 181 were in fact dotted all across the Western Desert. At one time the Desert Air Force used LG 125, which was well behind enemy lines; I doubled it for luck and called it LG 250. Air Commodore Collishaw's policy of foxing the Italian air force was a reality, but it was not such a total success as some historians have suggested. Like Barton, Collishaw sometimes pushed his luck too far and his squadrons took heavy punishment. Like Barton, Collishaw tolerated no questioning of his orders. On one occasion he sent a squadron of Blenheims to attack the same target for the fourth day running. The squadron commander pointed out that this really was asking for trouble. Collishaw insisted the raid was the last thing the enemy would expect. “We're going to fox 'em,” he said. The squadron commander still protested. Collishaw asked: “Are you trying to tell me that you haven't the guts to do your job?” The squadron took off and was swamped by enemy fighters over the target. Only two of its nine Blenheims survived. For once, the enemy had not been foxed.

The manner of Kit Carson's dying is based on the experience of a fighter pilot in North Africa, who told me how easy it was, in the haste of baling-out, to release the parachute harness—simply from force of habit. He himself very nearly did it; and he is convinced that a member of his squadron really did do it.

The episode involving Butcher Bailey's return to LG 181 on the back of a German motorcycle combination is based on an actual incident in the desert. Similarly, Hick Hooper's encounter with exploding ambulances was suggested to me by the experience of a friend who was ground-strafing over northern France in 1944 when he saw a German ambulance blow up spectacularly. Thereafter, he said, he strafed every German ambulance he saw; most of them exploded. He believed they were carrying ammunition. The presence of an American pilot in the desert was
not unusual. Many squadrons were made up of pilots from several countries, and by 1942 there were two American fighter squadrons in the Middle East.

The Takoradi Trail is fact. So is the Luftwaffe's raid on Fort Lamy. The Trail covered 3,697 miles and the journey took six days. The first two thousand miles were the worst: “where the weather was uniformly unaccountable and forced landings offered an agreeable choice between impenetrable forest and empty wilderness,” as the historian Philip Guedalla observed. One machine in ten failed to complete the journey. Nevertheless, over five thousand aircraft took the Takoradi route to Egypt, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder said of the men who made possible this steady transfusion, “without their loyal, ever-willing, and tireless assistance our recent successes would have been impossible.” Air superiority preceded ground victory.

The Luftwaffe knew this. As Francis K. Mason has described in
The Hawker Hurricane
, a Heinkel 111H took off from a remote airstrip called
Campo Uno
, deep in the south of the Libyan desert, at eight a.m. on January 21, 1942. Its crew included a German explorer, Hauptmann Blaich, and an Italian desert expert, Major Count Vimercati. The Heinkel reached Fort Lamy at two-thirty p.m., bombed the airfield, destroying eight Hurricanes and eighty thousand gallons of fuel, and headed back the way it had come. At six-thirty p.m., after ten and a half hours in the air, it ran out of fuel and made a forced landing in the desert.

Eventually the Luftwaffe Desert Rescue Flight found the Heinkel and refueled it. It was flown home. Meanwhile the Takoradi route was closed for lack of fuel for several weeks. We can only assume that the Luftwaffe did not realize how much damage this one raid had done: they never repeated it.

The “thermos” bombs on the Trigh el 'Abd existed, and
the hazards of dune driving were all too real (although it is unlikely that any column would have been quite so lemming-like as Jakowski's men). Sun compasses were essential for long-range travel in the desert. Details of food, of water rations, and of the “sand-happy” state called “doolally” are as accurate as I could make them.

The episode in which a time-pencil-fuse accidentally starts burning in the back of a jeep was suggested by an incident involving Stirling, Mayne and others as they drove across the Jebel after a raid. They jumped out only seconds before the fuse—still attached to a bomb—went off and the jeep was blown to bits.

There is a scene in which the Chief Censor in Cairo refers to some ill-timed BBC news bulletins about the fall of Benghazi. In fact those bulletins concerned the fall of Tobruk later in 1942. I rearranged the event in order to help my narrative.

No such adjustment was necessary to describe the risk that a unit operating far behind enemy lines might be attacked by “friendly” aircraft. Kennedy Shaw reports one occasion when a patrol was thoroughly strafed by Beaufighters of the Desert Air Force. This hazard was inseparable from the work of the LRDG and the SAS.

The curious visit of Malplacket and Lester to Benghazi is similar to one that was actually carried out by Stirling, Randolph Churchill and Fitzroy Maclean in May 1942, although the latter made a much more conspicuous entry and exit. The front wheels of their car had developed a loud, high-pitched, two-tone screech. “We could hardly have made more noise if we had been in a fire engine with its bell clanging,” Maclean wrote later. However this racket did not disturb the enemy.

No account can do full justice to the courage, skill and determination of the men of the SAS and the Desert Air Force. Theirs was a hard and lonely war, often fought in desolate conditions. Especially, I am aware that my description
of life in the desert is inadequate. You had to be there to know how grim and brutally unpleasant (and yet sometimes how clean and beautiful) the desert could be. Erik de Mauny was there, and in
Return to Oasis
(Shepherd-Walwyn, 1980) he wrote: “Flies descended in plagues of biblical proportions, heavy chlorination made the water ration almost undrinkable, and when the
khamseen
blew, its fine dust infiltrated the body's most intimate recesses, setting up colonies of desert sores.” There were always two enemies to be fought “up the blue.” The desert was the other, and it never lost.