Eastern Approaches (29 page)

But too much dash had its penalties. Many of the sand dunes fell away sharply on the far side and if you arrived at the top at full speed, you were likely to plunge headlong over the precipice on the far side before you could stop yourself, and end up with your truck upside down on top of you forty or fifty feet below.

The tracks we left gave a vivid picture of our progress. Sometimes, when the going was good, they ran straight and even like railway lines; at others when things were going less well, they wavered and branched off; where disaster had overtaken us, they ended in a confused tangle of footprints, tyre marks and holes in the sand.

But ours were not the only tracks which scarred the face of the desert and, fortunately, from the air fresh tracks are not easily distinguishable from old ones. Otherwise it would not have been difficult
for enemy aircraft to track us down from the air. Even so, a party as large as ours, trundling across the open desert in broad daylight and throwing up a great cloud of dust, could not hope to be as unobtrusive as a single patrol, and we knew that, once spotted, we should offer a splendid target. Above all, it was important that we should not attract the attention of the Italian garrison, while passing Jalo, for they were known to be in wireless touch with Benghazi, and a message from them at this stage of the proceedings announcing our approach would have deprived us of any hope of success.

Accordingly we timed our journey so as to pass the Jalo gap at midday, when the heat haze made visibility poor. When the navigators reckoned we were abreast of the oasis, we halted and I climbed to the top of a little conical hill to have a look round. There was nothing to be seen except a few depressed-looking camels chewing at the almost non-existent scrub, and westwards on the horizon, some black specks, jumping up and down in the haze, which, by a stretch of imagination might have been the palm trees of Jalo. On the top of my hill I found a chianti flask. I wished that it had been full. Then we had a hurried meal of tinned salmon and biscuits, washed down with half a mug of tepid water, and hurried on.

Now that we were nearing the coast, where we were more likely to encounter patrolling aircraft, we only moved by night, lying up by day and camouflaging the trucks. Once again we picked our way cautiously across the Trigh-el-Abd, keeping a sharp look out for thermos bombs.

But not sharp enough. As we were half way across, I heard an explosion immediately behind me, and looking round, saw that the three-tonner which had been following in my tracks had had a wheel blown off by a thermos bomb, which my own jeep had gone over but had been too light to explode. Fortunately the height of the three-tonner from the ground had protected the occupants and no one was hurt. The three-tonner’s load was distributed among the other trucks and we continued on our way.

Two or three days later we reached the welcome cover of the Gebel. So far as we could tell, our convoy had completed its journey across 800 miles of open desert, to a destination 600 miles behind the enemy’s
front line, without being spotted either from the air or from the ground. This was encouraging.

Our first care on reaching the Gebel was to get into touch with Bob Melot. Melot was a middle-aged Belgian cotton merchant who lived in Alexandria. Before the war he and his wife had for their own amusement taken some trips into the desert in their Ford car; he also spoke some Arabic. When the desert campaign started he offered his services to the British Army, and was commissioned as a subaltern. Thereafter he only paid occasional visits to his home in Alexandria. The rest of his time was spent in the desert, hundreds of miles behind the enemy lines. He lived on his own or with the Beduins for months on end, picking up information which he sent back by wireless. For food, he depended on dumps of rations left for him by the Long-Range Desert Group and on what he could get from the Arabs. He was obliged to keep moving from hiding-place to hiding-place, in order to avoid the search parties which the enemy sent out after him. It would have been an arduous life even for a much younger man.

After asking at a number of Beduin tents, we were directed to the
wadi
where Melot was lying up. He was cheerful, but tired and extremely hungry, for Rommel’s advance to Alamein had interfered with his supplies. I cooked him some rather stodgy bully beef rissoles fried in oatmeal, which he ate avidly. At last I had found someone who appreciated my cooking.

Then we got out our maps and discussed the forthcoming operation. It appeared that there had been a number of rather suspicious enemy troop movements in the neighbourhood during the past week or ten days. In particular, various outposts on the edge of the Gebel had been strengthened. It looked rather as though we were expected. I remembered what I had been told in Alexandria before we started.

We decided to make further investigations. First of all we had a talk to two of the local Sheikhs, dignified old gentlemen with grey beards, who were friends of Melot’s. We squatted on the ground on a hilltop, brewed up some tea, and talked inconclusively in a mixture of Arabic and Italian. The gist of their information was that the enemy seemed to be uneasy about something.

In view of this further confirmation of our suspicions, Melot suggested that he should send one of his Arabs, a deserter from the Italian army who was a native of Benghazi, to the town itself to see what he could pick up. That afternoon we took the Arab as far as the edge of the escarpment and started him off on his twenty miles’ walk to Benghazi, with instructions to spend the next day there and come back to us the following night. He set off down the escarpment, grumbling as he went. We shouted after him to buy us some cigarettes and matches in Benghazi. He looked, I thought, singularly unreliable.

Melot and I settled down to wait for him in a nearby
wadi
. The rest of the party were camping five or six miles back. I cooked some more rissoles.

All next day we lay low and waited, lying in the scrub. Melot told me about the First World War, in which he had taken part as a pilot in the Belgian Air Force and about his life in the Gebel.

That night we sat up waiting for our spy. There was no sign of him. Then, after breakfast, just as we were beginning to give up hope, he limped in complaining that his feet hurt him and looking more unreliable than ever. But he had brought us some cigarettes, decorated with a large Fascist badge on the box and some little Italian wax matches —
cerini
. I had not seen any since before the war. We gave him something to eat and started to question him; Melot in Arabic and I in Italian.

He had a lot to tell us. He had stayed the night with relatives. He had also been round the bazaar. The bazaar, he said, was full of the news of our impending attack, which had upset local opinion quite considerably. The civilian population was being temporarily evacuated; a strong German machine-gun detachment had arrived as well as Italian infantry reinforcements, minefields had been laid at different points round the city perimeter, including the place where we hoped to force our way in. Finally, the actual date of our attack — September 14th — was being freely mentioned.

In fact his report was far from reassuring.

Taking our Arab with us, we made our way back to the
wadi
where the rest of the party had camped. When we got there, we found that David and the main force had just arrived. They had been delayed by
a number of breakdowns on the way, and in order to make up time had travelled day and night. They did not think they had been spotted from the air. A jeep had been blown up by thermos bombs crossing the Trigh-el-Abd and the occupants killed. One was an elderly lieutenant in the R.N.R., who had been harbour master at Benghazi during the British occupation of the town the year before and was coming to show us round when we reached the harbour. It seemed hard that he should have been killed in this way at such an early stage in the proceedings.

We told David our news, and after some discussion he decided to send a signal to G.H.Q. asking whether they wished to make any change in the original plan in view of the extensive publicity which it seemed to have received. Clearly, now that we had got so far, there could be no question of coming away again without making our raid, but a change of time-table might help to put the enemy off his guard.

The answer came back in a few hours: we were to disregard bazaar gossip and carry out the operation according to the original time-table.

Evidently there was nothing in the rumours we had picked up. It looked as though Melot’s Arab had simply been trying to make our flesh creep, and put us off an operation in which he had no wish to take part. We continued our preparations, feeling reassured.

Our plan was simple. The main body, relying on the element of surprise, so essential in operations of this kind, would make its way down the escarpment at nightfall, cross the intervening plain, rush the road block and drive at full speed down to the harbour, where various targets had been allotted to different parties. After that we would see how things went.

A problem was caused by the existence of an Italian wireless post in a small fort on the edge of the escarpment, so situated that we were bound to pass close to it on our way down. It was decided that a party should set out, slightly in advance of the main expedition, for the purpose of silencing the occupants before they could give the alarm.

In order to lower the morale of the enemy, and also to make them keep their heads down until the last possible moment, the R.A.F. had
been asked to bomb the town and harbour as hard as they could for the two hours preceding our arrival, which was timed for half an hour before midnight.

By the early afternoon of September 13th, our preparations were complete. The guns, which even their close-fitting quilted covers could not entirely protect against the all-pervading sand, had been cleaned once again. The explosives, under Bill Cumper’s care, were ready. The doctor, we noticed, was busy preparing bandages, splints and blood plasma against our return. Each of us was issued with our ‘escape set’ in case we got left behind or captured; a map of the Western Desert printed on fine silk, to be hidden in the lining of our battle-dress; a small compass masquerading as a button; some benzedrine tablets; a collapsible water-bottle; and various other ingenious devices to be distributed about one’s person.

The party that was to attack the fort started first. Bob Melot insisted on leading it. With him went Chris Bailey, a new recruit to the S.A.S. whom we all liked and who, before the war, had run a hotel in Cyprus.

Then our own turn came. The branches and camouflage nets were stripped from the vehicles and the covers taken off the guns; we ate rather hurriedly a bar of chocolate and a tin of sardines; the convoy assembled, and we jolted off in the failing light, following a winding valley down towards the plain.

For the first hour or two the country was familiar. We were following the route that Melot and I had taken to the edge of the escarpment. The maps were inaccurate and we found our way through a maze of
wadis
largely by the help of landmarks; a burnt-out German truck; a Mohammedan shrine; the unusual outline of a hilltop.

Clearly it was going to be no easy matter for a convoy the size of ours to negotiate the precipitous escarpment, especially as our choice of routes was limited by the latest enemy troop dispositions. Melot’s Arab, who claimed to know a good way down, was brought up to the front of the column and used as a guide.

He turned out to be a very poor one. It was now quite dark. The track soon became increasingly precipitous and showed signs of
petering out altogether. It was strewn, too, with immense boulders which grated ominously on the sumps of the trucks. After a good deal of whispered barracking from me in Italian, our guide finally agreed that we must be in the wrong
wadi
. The process of extracting the column from it, and searching for a new way down was long and painful.

Meanwhile the R.A.F. had been bombing Benghazi for some time. We could see the bombs bursting. By the time we reached the foot of the escarpment and started out across the coastal plain, the bombardment had stopped. The searchlights flicked round the sky once or twice more and then went out. The moon was down. We should not now reach Benghazi until well after the appointed hour. We seemed to have been on the way a long time. It was cold and the effects of the rum we had drunk before starting had long since worn off. We cursed the Arab roundly.

At last we reached the tarmac road and a few minutes later were nearing the outskirts of the town. It would not be long now before things began to happen. So far there had been no sign of the enemy.

We were almost on top of the road block before we saw it. This time there was no red light and no sentry. Only a bar across the road. Beyond it, in the shadows, something was flapping in the wind. The leading vehicles stopped and word was passed back for the rest of the column to halt, while we investigated matters further. On either side of the road there was wire and in places the soil seemed to have been dug up. This looked unpleasantly like the minefield we had heard about. If so, it meant that our only line of approach lay along the road and through the road blocks. David summoned Bill Cumper, as the expert on mines, and invited him to give his opinion of this somewhat disquieting discovery.

Bill made one of his inevitable jokes and then we watched him while he went forward and poked about in the darkness. Evidently our suspicions were well founded, for after a quick look round, he turned his attention to the road block. He fiddled with the catch for a second or so, and then the bar flew up, leaving the way open for us to advance.

The situation, Bill felt, called for a facetious remark, and, as usual, he
rose to the occasion. ‘Let battle commence,’ he said in his best Stanley Holloway manner, stepping politely aside to let the leading jeep through.

The words were hardly out of his mouth when pandemonium broke loose. From the other side of the road block a dozen machine-guns opened up at us at point-blank range; then a couple of 20-mm. Bredas joined in, and then some heavy mortars, while sniper’s bullets pinged viciously through the trees on either side of the road.