Eastern Approaches (26 page)

The L.R.D.G. had their mess in some modern buildings built by the Egyptian Government, and there they made us welcome. The unit was made up of a number of patrols recruited from volunteers from different regiments or formations. There was a Guards Patrol, a New Zealand Patrol, a Rhodesian Patrol and so on. We were to be escorted on our present venture by the Guards Patrol, and we were now taken charge of by Robin Gurdon, who commanded it.

We could not have had a better host. Robin had come to the L.R.D.G. after a long spell in the desert with the Coldstream Guards. Though no longer, by our standards at any rate, so very young, he had spent all his war as a junior regimental officer and most of it fighting. He performed the arduous duties which he had chosen superlatively well and obstinately refused the many Staff appointments which would have been open to him. He was to be killed on his next patrol, continuing to direct operations to the end after he had been mortally wounded.
Now, a tall elegant figure with a heavy fair moustache, his face burnt black by the sun, he made us welcome in the two-roomed, doorless and windowless mud hut in which he lived, as hospitably as though it had been a country house at home: showing us where to spread our bedding rolls, arranging for us to be called with tea and shaving water, and arranging for trucks to take us down to bathe.

At the Headquarters Mess we met the Commanding Officer, Colonel Prendergast, and Bill Shaw, the Intelligence Officer. Both had known the Western Desert well before the war, when they had spent their leave exploring it on their own account in company with Colonel R. A. Bagnold. Now that the desert, from being a geographical curiosity, had become an area of first-rate strategical importance, their knowledge was of inestimable value. Fortunately General Wavell, with characteristic insight, had been quick to grasp this and in 1940 had entrusted Bagnold and his companions with the task of raising the L.R.D.G.

The more I saw of the L.R.D.G., the more impressed I was. There seemed to be nothing they did not know about the desert. In the two years since the unit had first been formed, their patrols had covered immense areas of country which the two conflicting armies, as they fought their way up and down the narrow coastal strip in the north, had left completely untouched. With the help of the sun-compass and the theodolite they had perfected the art of desert navigation and could bring you unerringly to a given hillock or heap of stones hundreds of miles away in the middle of a vast expanse of featureless sand and gravel. They had mapped and charted great stretches of unknown desert and could tell you with unfailing accuracy what to expect in the way of going, where you could hope to get through with a light truck and where with a three-tonner, where to look for cover and how to find the occasional well, half choked up with sand, upon which your survival might easily depend. They had worked out to the last ounce and the last gallon the amount of food, water and petrol needed to take so many men and so many vehicles so far. They had made dumps of food and petrol in safe places which patrols could fall back on if necessary and which meant that they could stay away from their base far longer than would otherwise have been possible. Finally they had
a first-class system of wireless-communications which enabled the patrols to keep in constant touch with Headquarters and flash back immediately the vital information which they collected from hundreds of miles behind the enemy lines.

Officers and other ranks alike were volunteers. They needed to be, for staying in the desert for weeks on end, short of food and short of water, is not everyone’s idea of fun. But these men had deliberately chosen this life, and few units could compare with them for morale.

When our preparations were completed, we left Siwa. The L.R.D.G. had provided us with the Arab head-dresses which they wore themselves. We were delighted with them. Apart from their romantic appearance, they were extremely practical articles of equipment. They were cool to wear and gave good protection against the sun, and, when you were not wearing them, you could use them as a towel or a dish-cloth or spread them over your face and go to sleep, oblivious to sun, sand and flies.

At first the going was good — a surface of hard smooth gravel over which we bowled along at forty miles an hour. Then, a little further on, we struck our first patch of soft sand and were soon out pushing and pulling in the midday sun, while our vehicles plunged and floundered helplessly. Desert travel is a succession of such contrasts, but, under the expert guidance of the L.R.D.G., we fared on the whole remarkably well, encountering a minimum of difficulties.

First we drove almost due north for 80 miles or so in the direction of Sollum, which brought us to the Wire. This was a barbed-wire entanglement, six feet high and thirty feet wide, running southwards for two hundred miles from the coast along the Libyan-Egyptian frontier, which had been erected ten years earlier by Marshal Graziani at a cost of a quarter of a million pounds, in the hope of better controlling the permanently disaffected native population of the province of which he was governor. But by now there were a number of gaps in it, and through one of these we slipped, like rabbits into a bed of lettuces.

During the first days we moved from dawn till dusk. Taking off our shirts, we drove in nothing but drill shorts and sandals. The Libyan
sun was blazing hot, but at the speed at which we were moving there was always a breeze and we did not feel its heat. At midday we stopped briefly for lunch — tinned salmon or sardines and tinned fruit, unwonted luxuries included in the L.R.D.G.’s special scale of rations. Then, when the wireless operator had made contact with Siwa and the navigator checked our position, we climbed back into our trucks and drove on till sundown.

After driving for twelve hours or more, the evening halt would be something to look forward to. Night falls quickly in the desert and the air grows suddenly cold. All at once you would feel the need of every scrap of clothing you possessed. Supper did not take long to prepare: hot bully stew; tea, and sometimes a tot of rum. It was cooked over a desert fire, made by pouring some petrol into a tin filled with sand, which then burned with a steady flame for a surprisingly long time. After we had eaten, and filled our water bottles from the water tank in preparation for the following day, we would sit round the fire muffled in our greatcoats. Robin had a white Hebron sheepskin coat. Sometimes when the day’s signals had been sent and received, the wireless would be turned to more frivolous uses and we would listen to jazz music, or to Tommy Handley, or to the eight o’clock news from London. Or to Lili Marlene, the new German
chanteuse
, singing her special song for the Afrika Corps from Radio Belgrade, now in enemy hands:

Unter der Laterne,

Vor dem grossen Tor …

Husky, sensuous, nostalgic, sugar-sweet, her voice seemed to reach out to you, as she lingered over the catchy tune, the sickly sentimental words. Belgrade … The continent of Europe seemed a long way away. I wondered when I would see it again and what it would be like by the time we got there.

Soon the fire would die down and we would seek out a soft patch of sand on which to spread our sleeping-bags. We slept soundly under the stars with a cool breeze playing on our faces.

The noise of the cook getting breakfast woke you before dawn. From your sleeping-bag you watched the desert fire flare up against
the lightening sky. There were five short minutes more before you need get up. Then ‘Come and get it’ shouted the cook, rattling his can, and you crawled out of your sleeping-bag, pulled on your boots, collected mug and mess-tin and stumbled sleepily over to the fire.

It was a good breakfast: porridge, sausage, sometimes tinned bacon, biscuit and hot sweet tea. Afterwards you cleaned your mug and mess-tin in the sand, for water was too precious to waste on washing up; rolled up your bedding roll; helped load the trucks; and drove on. Soon the sun was high in the sky and you could shed, first your greatcoat, then your sweater, and then your shirt.

Our course, now that we were through the wire, lay roughly north-west. The desert was sometimes flat, sometimes broken and undulating; sometimes sandy, sometimes hard and stony; in colour a mixture of greys and browns and yellows and reds, all bleached by the sun and merging one into the other. We came upon nothing resembling an oasis; but in some places the rains had produced an ephemeral crop of coarse grass and scrub. Once or twice we saw gazelle, tiny creatures hardly larger than hares, bounding away in front of the trucks. One night I killed a snake as it was crawling into my sleeping-bag. One day a Beaufighter flew over us and we felt uncomfortably conspicuous with our enemy recognition mark exposed to view.

Soon we were parallel with Gazala where, further north on the coast, the two armies were facing each other. In our own very small way, we were turning the enemy’s flank. From now onwards we would be behind his lines, and must look out for trouble.

For the last part of the journey we travelled by night and lay up by day. Our routine was reversed. We moved off after supper and stopped to bivouack at first light. Breakfast would be more welcome than ever. After a long chilly night’s drive, straining our eyes in the darkness for unseen obstacles and pitfalls, we found that there was a lot to be said for a dram of whisky stirred into our porridge. It made a sustaining and stimulating mixture which I can warmly recommend as a breakfast dish to all engaged on similar enterprises.

Our first care when we halted was to camouflage our trucks against observation from the air. We usually chose as a stopping-place a dip
in the ground, or some rocks, or a patch of scrub. Carefully disposing our vehicles so as to make the best use of such cover as there was, we would then set about blending them into the background, with bits of scrub and camouflage nets stretched right over them. The L.R.D.G. trucks were painted with a bold design of rose-pink and olive-green, which, oddly enough, made them practically invisible against the desert. Later the S.A.S. adopted the same camouflage, and several times I was caught with a vehicle in the open by low-flying enemy aircraft without the pilot seeming to notice us.

Our camouflage completed, we would settle down to try and get some sleep. But it was hard to escape the glare of the sun which beat down mercilessly, pursuing us, as it rose higher, from one dwindling patch of shade to another. Then there were the flies, which appeared by myriads in a place where, an hour before, there had been no sign of life, and buzzed and crawled over your face as you lay. It was hard, too, lying there sweating, with nothing else to think of, to forget how thirsty you were. But in the end exhaustion would get the best of it and you would drowse off and wake to find the cook warming up the bully stew in readiness for a start at dusk.

On one such day, as we were dozing fitfully beside the trucks, we were brought back to our senses half-way through the morning by a shout from the look-out man, who came running up to say that he could see something moving on the skyline. In turn, we took the glasses and peered at it, distinctly recognizable as a motor vehicle of some kind and now disappearing rapidly over the horizon.

Where we were, we had to assume that any vehicle we encountered was an enemy one. And we could not afford to let an enemy vehicle get back to its base with the news that it had seen us. Snatching up our tommy-guns, David and I jumped into the battle-waggon and set out after it at top speed.

We soon began to gain on it. From nearer by it looked like a British truck, but there were too many of our trucks in enemy hands to go by this alone. When the driver saw us he accelerated sharply, and went careering wildly off across the desert, ignoring our signals to stop. But our Ford was the faster car and we had soon headed him off and brought him to a standstill.

The truck stopped and two figures in grubby khaki shirts and shorts got out of it. We asked them who they were. ‘S.A.S.,’ they said resentfully with a strong foreign accent.

We thought we had them there.

But then they explained in guttural English that they were members of a South African Survey Unit, now engaged in surveying this part of the desert. When we pointed out to them that they were miles behind the enemy lines, they seemed mildly surprised. They didn’t, they said, bother about anything much except their work, and it hadn’t occurred to them that anything might be wrong until we had started to chase them. We advised them to be more careful in future and left them. They made off as fast as they could go.

Afterwards we wondered if we should not have perhaps examined their credentials rather more closely.

Between us and our destination, running from Agedabia northeastwards to the sea, lay the Trigh-el-Abd, an ancient caravan route between the coast and the interior. It consisted of innumerable trails, spreading over a wide stretch of country, and was strewn along its whole length with the whitened bones of camels, and no doubt of men, who in the course of centuries had fallen by the way and been left to die.

Of more immediate interest to us was the fact that it was also strewn with ‘thermos’ bombs. These handy little devices, the size and shape of a thermos flask, were broadcast by the enemy over areas where they thought that our patrols might pass. Half covered by loose sand, they were hard to see and, exploding, did considerable damage to any vehicle that drove over them. We accordingly timed our departure from our previous stopping-place so as to perform this part of our journey in daylight, and, keeping a sharp look-out for bombs, emerged unscathed on the other side.

After crossing the Trigh-el-Abd, we skirted round to the east of Msus, where there was an enemy garrison, and turned in a northwesterly direction towards the coast. Now, more and more frequently, we came upon little groups of burnt-out tanks and trucks, some bearing enemy markings and some British, some with the mangled bodies of their crews still in them, reminders of the bitter fighting of the previous
winter. Sometimes, too, the wrecks of aircraft, fighters and bombers, lying where they had crashed far out in the desert, would loom up like ghosts in the moonlight.