Eastern Approaches (27 page)

Then, one morning, after we had driven all night, first light showed us a completely new landscape. Instead of the Libyan Desert, we might have been in the Highlands of Scotland. We were driving across brownish-green hills and moorland thickly covered with scrub, with here and there stunted trees. The spring flowers had faded, but the wind was heavy with the scent of wild thyme. We passed a Moslem shrine with its tattered banners, such as I had seen in Central Asia. We passed a heap of stones, marking a well, the earth round it trampled by sheep, goats and donkeys.

We had reached the Gebel Akhdar — the Green Mountain — the hilly country which lies south from the coastal plain and which was to serve us as a temporary base. We were within a few hours’ drive of Benghazi.

Well watered, by comparison with the desert, the Gebel was fertile enough to support the flocks and herds of the Beduin who dwelt in it. These were nomads for the most part and, like the people of Siwa, belonged to the Senussi sect. Their bitter hatred of the Italians made them the loyal allies of anyone who, like ourselves, was fighting against them. We were thus, in a sense, in friendly country. There was water, too, and, by desert standards, reasonably good cover. Apart from occasional punitive expeditions or search parties, the enemy were inclined to keep out of the whole area.

To the north and east the Gebel fell away abruptly in a steep escarpment at the foot of which lay the coastal plain. Coaxing our trucks across country, along goat tracks and dried-up water-courses, we made our way to a point near the top of the escarpment from which, twenty miles away across the plain, we could see the white walls of Benghazi and beyond them the blue Mediterranean shimmering in the sunlight. Then, camouflaging our trucks among the plentiful natural cover, we camped near them on the sandy bed of one of the dried-up water-courses or
wadis
with which the Gebel abounds.

We did not remain alone for long. We had not seen any Arabs on the way, but they had seen us and now several of them came to
visit us. We gave them cups of tea and they gave us eggs. Then we showed them a photograph of Sayed Idris es Senussi, head of their sect and grandson of its founder, who at that time was living under British protection in Egypt. They fingered it admiringly, looking first at it and then at us and grinning.

It was May 20th. We were to go into Benghazi on the twenty-first. We had another twenty-four hours. That night, as we lay in our sleeping-bags, we could see the flashes of the bombs bursting over the town. The R.A.F. were doing their stuff. The moist sea breeze was relaxing after the dry air of the desert and we were soon asleep.

Next morning we made our final preparations. Weapons were cleaned and ammunition counted out and distributed. The rubber boats were taken out; inflated; deflated; and packed up again.

Our friends the Beduin came back and watched us. This time they were accompanied by an Arab we had not seen before, a more sophisticated figure wearing a trilby hat and carrying a neatly rolled umbrella. The newcomer, whom we named the City Slicker, spoke fluent Italian and showed more interest in our affairs than we liked. Reports had reached us of Italian agents sent into the Gebel to watch for British patrols and report on their movement. Could this be one? It looked as though he might be. We were debating as to the wisdom of taking him into protective custody, when, looking round, we found that he had gone.

Meanwhile, in their corner of the
wadi
, Cooper, Seekings and Rose were getting the explosives ready: unpacking the bombs and limpets and fitting the time-pencils and detonators to them. Suddenly there was a sharp report and an oath. We hurried across to see what had happened. A detonator had exploded in Corporal Seekings’s hand. He was not badly hurt, but his hand was out of action and there could be no question of his going with us. We were one man short.

It is an ill wind … The crack of the detonator had hardly died away, when Randolph appeared, jubilant. His exclusion from our expedition had been a sore point, but this, it seemed to him, made everything easy. Already he was oiling his tommy-gun and polishing his pistol in preparation for the night’s work.

Such keenness, David felt, could not be left unrewarded. A spare
N.C.O. who had come with us as a possible replacement in an emergency, was told, much to his disgust, that he would not be needed, and Randolph took Corporal Seekings’s place.

We set out in the late afternoon. Two of the L.R.D.G. trucks came with us. It was getting dark as we reached the escarpment. We followed the bed of one of the smaller
wadis
down into the plain, easing the battle-waggon as carefully as we could over the rough ground and boulders. Here and there we passed little groups of Arabs working in the fields. They waved to us and we threw them cigarettes. The going was difficult and it was not till ten that we reached the main Barce-Benghazi road, where the L.R.D.G. trucks were to leave us. It had taken us five hours to do fourteen miles.

Round about us on the plain we could see the camp fires of the Arabs twinkling in the dark. We lit a fire too and brewed up. It was cold and the hot strong sweet tea was welcome. Then we said goodbye to the L.R.D.G., told them to expect us for breakfast in the morning, switched on our headlights and drove off. David and I sat in front with Gordon Alston between us. Randolph and the two N.C.O.s sat in the back. David was driving.

Once we had left the desert and were on the smooth tarmac road, we noticed that the car was making an odd noise. It was more than a squeak. It was a high-pitched screech with two notes in it. Evidently one of the many jolts which they had received had damaged the track-rods. Now the wheels were out of alignment and this was the result.

We lay back on our backs in the road and tinkered. It was no use. When we got back into the car and drove off again, the screech was louder than ever. We could hardly have made more noise if we had been in a fire engine with its bell clanging. It was awkward, but there was nothing we could do about it now. Fortunately it did not seem to affect the speed of the car.

Soon we were passing the high wire fence round Regima aerodrome. We were not far from Benghazi now. We were going at a good speed and should be there in five or ten minutes. I hoped that the Intelligence Branch were right in thinking there was no road block. It was cold
in the open car. Feeling in my greatcoat pocket I found a bar of milk chocolate that had been forgotten there. I unwrapped it and ate it. It tasted good.

Then, suddenly, we turned a corner and I saw something that made me sit up and concentrate. A hundred yards away, straight ahead of us, a red light was showing right in the middle of the road.

D
AVID
jammed on the brakes and we slithered to a standstill. There was a heavy bar of wood across the road with a red lantern hanging from the middle of it. On my side of the road stood a sentry who had me covered with his tommy-gun. He was an Italian. I bent down and picked up a heavy spanner from the floor of the car. Then I beckoned to the sentry to come nearer, waving some papers at him with my free hand as if I wanted to show them to him. If only he would come near enough I could knock him on the head and we could drive on.

He did not move, but kept me covered with his tommy-gun. Then I saw that beyond him in the shadows were two or three more Italians with tommy-guns and what looked like a guardroom or a machine-gun post. Unless we could bluff our way through there would be nothing for it but to shoot it out, which was the last thing we wanted at this stage of the expedition.

There was a pause and then the sentry asked who we were. ‘Staff Officers,’ I told him, and added peremptorily, ‘in a hurry.’ I had not spoken a word of Italian for three years and I hoped devoutly that my accent sounded convincing. Also that he would not notice in the dark that we were all wearing British uniform.

He did not reply immediately. It looked as though his suspicions were aroused. In the car behind me I heard a click, as the safety catch of a tommy-gun slid back. Someone had decided not to take any chances.

Then, just as I had made my mind up that there was going to be trouble, the sentry pointed at our headlights. ‘You ought to get those dimmed,’ he said, and, saluting sloppily, opened the gate and stood aside to let us pass. Screeching loudly, we drove on towards Benghazi.

Soon we were on the outskirts of the town.

Coming towards us were the headlights of another car. It passed us
Then looking back over our shoulders, we saw that it had stopped and turned back after us. This looked suspicious. David slowed down to let it pass. The car slowed down too. He accelerated; the car accelerated. He stopped altogether; the car did the same. Then he decided to shake it off. He put his foot down on the accelerator, and, screeching louder than ever, we drove into Benghazi at a good eighty miles an hour with the other car after us.

Once in the town, we turned the first corner we came to and, switching off our headlights, stopped to listen. The other car shot past and went roaring off in the darkness. For the moment our immediate troubles were over.

But only for the moment. As we sat listening a rocket sailed up into the sky, then another, and then another. Then all the air-raid sirens in Benghazi started to wail. We had arranged with the R.A.F. before we started that they should leave Benghazi alone that night; so this could not be an air-raid warning. It looked very much as though the alert was being given in our honour. We remembered the two South Africans, and the City Slicker with his homburg hat, and the suspiciously casual behaviour of the sentry, and last, but not least, our pursuers in the car. It all added up to the same unpleasant conclusion: they were on to us.

Clearly the battle-waggon, with its distinctive screech, was no longer an asset now that the alarm had been given. We decided to get rid of it at once and take a chance of escaping on foot. Planting a detonator timed to go off in thirty minutes, amongst the explosives in the back, we started off in single file through the darkness.

We were in the Arab quarter of the town, which had suffered most heavily from the R.A.F. raids. Every other house was in ruins and, threading our way over the rubble through one bombed-out building after another, we had soon put several blocks between ourselves and the place where we had left the car to explode. Once or twice we stopped to listen. We would hear people walking along the adjacent streets, but no one seemed to be following us.

Then passing through a breach in a wall, we emerged unexpectedly in a narrow side-street, to find ourselves face to face with an Italian Carabiniere.

There was no avoiding him and it seemed better to take the initiative and accost him before he accosted us. The rockets and sirens provided a ready-made subject for conversation. ‘What,’ I asked, ‘is all this noise about?’ ‘Oh, just another of those damned English air-raids,’ he said gloomily. ‘Might it be,’ I inquired anxiously, ‘that enemy ground forces are raiding the town and that they are the cause of the alert?’ Even in his depressed state, he thought this a good joke and gave a chuckle. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s no need to be nervous about that, not with the British almost back on the Egyptian frontier.’

I thanked him for his reassuring remarks and wished him good night. Although we had been standing under a street light, he did not seem to have noticed that I was in British uniform.

This encounter put a different complexion on the situation. We seemed to have been unduly pessimistic. We might have a go at the harbour yet. And save ourselves a long walk back to the Gebel.

We hurried back to the car. Our watches showed that about twenty-five minutes had elapsed since we had set off the time-pencil. If it was an accurate one, there should still be five minutes to go before it detonated and blew up the car. If it was an accurate one. Nervously, we extricated it from the back of the car and threw it over the nearest wall. A minute or two later we heard it go off with a sharp crack. We had not been a moment too soon.

The next thing was to make our way to the harbour, which was about a mile off. The screech made it inadvisable to take the car. Accordingly we left Randolph and Corporal Rose to find somewhere to hide it, while David, Corporal Cooper and myself, with Alston as guide, started off for the harbour, armed with tommy-guns and carrying one of the boats and a selection of explosives in a kitbag. Soon we had left the dark alleyways of the Arab quarter behind us and were in the European part of the town. High white buildings loomed up round us, and our footsteps echoed noisily in the broad paved streets. Then, just as we were coming to the barbed-wire fence which surrounded the harbour, I caught sight of a sentry.

Laden as we were, we made a suspicious-looking party, and once again I thought it better to try to set his suspicions at rest by accosting him, rather than attempting to slink on unnoticed. ‘We have,’ I said,
thinking quickly, ‘just met with a motor accident. All this is our luggage. Can you direct us to a hotel where we can spend the night?’

The sentry listened politely. Then he said he was afraid that all the hotels had been put out of action by the accursed English bombing, but perhaps, if we went on trying, we would find somewhere to sleep. He seemed well disposed and had apparently noticed nothing wrong either with my Italian accent or with our uniforms. An unobservant man. We wished him good night and trudged off.

As soon as we were out of sight, we started to look for a place to get through the wire. Eventually we found one and dragged the boat and the explosives through it. Then dodging between cranes and railway trucks we made our way down to the water’s edge. Looking round at the dim outlines of the jetties and buildings, I realized with a momentary feeling of satisfaction, that we were on the identical strip of shingle which we had picked on as a likely starting-point on the wooden model at Alexandria. So far, so good.

David, who possesses the gift of moving silently and invisibly by night, now set off on a tour of the harbour with Alston, leaving Cooper and myself to inflate the boat. Crouching under a low sea wall, we unpacked the kitbag and set to work with the bellows. There was no moon, but brilliant starlight. The smooth, shining surface of the harbour was like a sheet of quicksilver, and the black hulls of the ships seemed no more than a stone’s throw away. They would make good targets if only we could reach them unobserved. At any rate, we should not have far to paddle, though I could have wished for a better background than this smooth expanse of water. Diligently we plugged away at the bellows, which squeaked louder than I liked, and seemed to be making little or no impression on the boat. Several minutes passed. The boat was still as flat as a pancake. We verified the connection and went on pumping.

Then suddenly we were hailed from one of the ships. It was a sentry. ‘Chi va la?’ he challenged. ‘Militari!’ I shouted back. There was a pause and we resumed pumping. But still the sentry was suspicious. ‘What are you up to over there?’ he inquired. ‘Nothing to do with you,’ I answered, with a show of assurance which I was far from feeling. After that there was silence.

Meanwhile the boat remained flat. There could only be one explanation. Somehow, since we had inspected it in the
wadi
that morning, it had got punctured. There was nothing for it but to go and fetch another. It was fortunate we had two. Hiding the first boat as best we could under the shadow of the wall, we crossed the docks, slipping unseen through the hole in the wire, and walked back through the silent streets to where we had left the car. There we found Randolph and Rose in fine fettle, trying with the utmost unconcern to manœuvre the car through a hole in the wall of a bombed-out house. Occasionally passers-by, Arabs for the most part, gaped at them with undisguised interest and admiration.

Wishing them luck, we pulled the second boat out of the car and started back to the harbour. Once again we got safely through the wire and down to the water’s edge, but only to find that the second boat, like the first, was uninflatable. It was heart-rending. Meanwhile there was no sign of David. We decided to go and look for him.

As we reached the hole in the wire we saw, to our disgust, someone standing on the other side of it. I was just thinking what to say in Italian, when the unknown figure spoke to me in English. It was David, who had been down to the water to look for us and had been as alarmed at not finding us as we had been at not finding him.

There followed a hurried council of war. All this tramping backwards and forwards had taken time and our watches showed that we had only another half-hour’s darkness. Already the sky was beginning to lighten. We debated whether or not to plant our explosives haphazard in the railway trucks with which the quays were crowded, but decided that, as targets, they were not important enough to justify us in betraying our presence in the harbour and thus prejudicing the success of an eventual large-scale raid. If we were to blow them up, the alarm would be given. We should probably be able to get away in the confusion, but another time we should stand a much poorer chance of raiding the harbour unnoticed. Our present expedition must thus be regarded as a reconnaissance. It was a hard decision to take, now that we had got so far.

If we were not to excite suspicion, it was essential to take away anything that would betray the fact that intruders had been in the harbour
area. This meant going back to the water’s edge to retrieve the boats, a nerve-racking trip of which we were beginning to get rather tired. This time, as I started to crawl through the hole in the wire, I suddenly found myself staring into a coal-black face, with round goggling eyes and a set of dazzling white teeth, like a nigger minstrel. It was an Ascari from Italian Somaliland. I did not like the look of him at all. Standing over me, he grunted menacingly and pointed his bayonet at the pit of my stomach. I felt at a distinct disadvantage. David and Corporal Cooper looked on with evident interest. It seemed a more intractable problem than we had hitherto encountered.

Infusing as much irritation into my voice as I could muster, I asked this formidable blackamoor what he wanted; but he only answered, ‘Non parlare Italiano,’ and went on prodding at me with his bayonet.

This gave me an opening. I have always found that in dealing with foreigners whose language one does not speak, it is best to shout. I did so now. ‘Non parlare Italiano?’ I yelled, working myself into a fury. ‘Non parlare Italiano!! And you a Caporale!!’ And I pointed to the stripe on his sleeve.

This seemed to shake him. He lowered his bayonet and looked at me dubiously. My confidence returned. Trying to give as good a representation as I could of an angry Italian officer, I continued to shout and gesticulate.

It was too much for the black man. With an expression of injured dignity, he turned and walked slowly away, leaving us to continue our progress down to the water’s edge. There we stuffed the boats and explosives back into the kitbags and started on our return journey, a weary and despondent little party.

It was at this stage that, looking round, I noticed that there were more of us than there should be. Two sentries with rifles and fixed bayonets had appeared from somewhere and fallen in behind.

These were a most unwelcome addition to the party. There was clearly no hope of shaking them off in the harbour area, and, with such companions, it would be fatal to try and negotiate the hole in the wire. Alternatively to try and shoot it out with them would bring the whole place about our ears. There was only one hope, and that was to try somehow to brazen it out.

Assuming as pompous a manner as my ten days’ beard and shabby appearance permitted, I headed for the main gate of the docks, followed by David and Corporal Cooper and the two Italian sentries. At the gate a sentry was on duty outside the guard tent. Walking straight up to him, I told him that I wished to speak to the Guard Commander. To my relief he disappeared obediently into the tent and came out a minute or two later followed by a sleepy-looking Sergeant, hastily pulling on his trousers. For the second time that night I introduced myself as an officer of the General Staff, thereby eliciting a slovenly salute. Next, I reminded him that he was responsible for the security of this part of the harbour. This he admitted sheepishly. How was it, I asked him, that I and my party had been able to wander freely about the whole area for the best part of the night without once being properly challenged or asked to produce our identity cards? He had, I added, warming to my task, been guilty of a gross dereliction of duty. Why, for all he knew, we might have been British saboteurs carrying loads of high explosive (at this he tittered incredulously, obviously thinking that I was laying it on a bit thick). Well, I said, I would let him off this time, but he had better not let me catch him napping again. What was more, I added, with a nasty look at the sentry, who winced, he had better do something about smartening up his men’s appearance.