The Sword of Fate (23 page)

There could be no argument against the Brigadier’s decision. I knew how disappointed Daphnis would be, but I realised that, having had such an easy time for months, now I had a chance to pull my weight it was only right that I should do so.

While we were in the sanatorium we heard the details of General Wavell’s first magnificent success, and although there was a feeling that the advance could not be maintained at this headlong pace for many days longer, good news continued to come in from the front almost every hour. Sollum had fallen on the same day as Fort Capuzzo, and now that the British were on Libyan soil the whole chain of desert forts along the frontier were surrendering one after another.

A terrific battle was said to be raging at ‘Hellfire’ Pass where the low coastal strip which lies between the sea and the great
escarpment that forms the central plateau of the Western Desert narrows to barely a mile in width. Along this flat narrow ribbon, bounded by the Mediterranean on one side and cliffs towering up sheer to five hundred feet in height on the other, the Imperial Forces were having to fight for every inch of ground in order to force the main gateway by which the all-important military road ran into Libya; but further south our mechanised units had penetrated to a much greater depth, and by the Thursday Bardia, the first considerable town over the frontier, had been surrounded.

It was on that day that I saw Paolo marched off as a prisoner on the road to Egypt, and took an affectionate leave of Teddy Bannister. I had told him all about my affair with Daphnis and he had promised to call on her and deliver another long letter from me personally.

With the Army of the Nile now operating over thousands of square miles of territory and units here one day only to be gone the next, I knew that the field post-offices could not possibly cope with the situation, and I had been considerably worried that Daphnis might not get my first letter or hear that I was a free man again perhaps for weeks, so it comforted me a lot now to know that Teddy would be seeing her within the next few days and be able to put a definite period to the anxiety which she must be feeling on my account.

Half an hour after we had parted I was on my way to join my old friends, the New Zealanders, who had taken up their positions just outside Bardia. I found them after no little difficulty in the early hours of the morning on Friday, December the 20th.

From them I learned that the first lightning assault which had broken the Italian front had been launched by regular units of the British Army, including the battalion of the Coldstream Guards with whom I had been when captured, and first-line troops of the Indian Army. These peace-time-trained shock troops had then been withdrawn and the eager volunteers from the Dominions allowed to go in for their baptism of fire; so after their first sweep forward, during which they had chivvied the enemy in a running fight, they were mad keen to get into Bardia.

The town was now completely encircled on land, and its harbour was closed by units of the British Navy, but as the first town on the Libyan side of the border, unlike Sollum on the Egyptian side, it had been systematically prepared over a number of years to resist attack.

The white-domed mosques and spindly minarets which we could see in the far distance through our field-glasses gave no
hint of the strength of the defences of the town, but every good site for miles around it had been surveyed long before the war by Italian staff officers, and pill-boxes with fields of crossfire built where they could be cunningly concealed by great mounds of sand. Further in, deep ditches had been dug as tank-traps and barbed wire had been set up in great quantities to render infantry advances difficult and hazardous.

When I arrived before the town our field guns were not even in range of it, but night and day our men gradually ate their way into the fringe of the defensive works, crawling over long stretches of sand at the imminent risk of their lives to lob Mills grenades into some strong-points, taking others by surprise in skilfully planned night attacks and causing others again to be hammered to pieces by the shells of our artillery.

Not a day passed without fresh prisoners being brought in, and it was my job to carry out their first interrogation before despatching them under guard to join the long stream of green-clad captives which was now wending its way into Egypt. Except for a few extra rounds of drinks, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve passed just like the others.

During the months before my own capture I had watched the experienced intelligence officers at Brigade and Division doing this work on the comparatively few Italians which we were able to bring in for questioning in those days. I had soon seen that some of these officers got much more out of the prisoners than others and that often much better results could be obtained by jollying the prisoner along or appearing sympathetic than by threats of rigorous confinement.

There was one regular captain that I had seen at work for whom I had the greatest admiration, and I tried to model myself on him. Using at first an entirely non-committal and colourless attitude towards each prisoner I attempted to sum him up psychologically, then I either thawed out to a state in which we eventually joked and smoked cigarettes together or, with violent blows of a short whip against a packing-case which served me as a table, I demanded answers to my questions with the same fierceness as any Prussian.

I soon discovered that to do such work well one needs to be something of an actor, and the first essential is to throw overboard any silly inhibitions about its not being done for a British officer to lose his temper or make a scene. I learned to work myself up into what appeared to be a frenzy of anger, often three or four times in a morning, and some of the wretched prisoners would
cower away from me in terror, thinking that I meant to shoot them on the spot as I stood over them with my pistol levelled. But more often I yarned pleasantly for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour about his native city with each fellow who was brought in, and, luckily, I knew Italy pretty well.

These methods were certainly successful as, either from a desire not to appear oafish when spoken to decently or from blue funk that I would have them treated as they had seen the Libyan Arabs treated at the orders of their own swinish commander, Marshal Graziani, they gave away any number of little things which helped us in planning our attacks locally and also for my reports which would later assist the high-ups at Headquarters to assess the number and disposition of the forces with which the Italians had garrisoned Libya.

The days were pleasantly warm as we had the benefit of the North African sunshine which in peace-time winters thousands of fortunate people pay the tourist agencies considerable sums to obtain; but the nights were bitter. We wore every scrap of clothing we could, including our greatcoats, yet we still shivered in our bivies until we fell asleep. Many of our fellows even preferred to go on night patrols or sentry duty in order that they could keep warm by moving about during the chill hours and sleep in comfort in the daytime.

On January the 3rd the Australians delivered a great frontal attack and made a considerable breach in the outer defences. There followed two days of most desperate fighting. The Navy shelled the town; the Air Force sent any Italian machine that appeared reeling from the skies, and bombed or machine-gunned the Italians wherever they endeavoured to concentrate their land forces; while the Army, tired, covered with dust, but in magnificent heart, strafed the Italian soldiery without cessation, chasing them from ridge to ridge until at last, on Sunday, January the 5th, Bardia surrendered.

Most of the troops reckoned then that they would get at least a few days to rest and refit before they were ordered to undertake further operations, but like the splendid soldiers they are Generals Wavell and Wilson knew that the last time to rest is during those rare precious hours when it is possible to pursue a fleeing enemy. On Monday the 6th, the advance on Tobruk was ordered. On Tuesday the 7th Tobruk aerodrome was captured, and on Wednesday the 8th, only three days after the fall of Bardia, Tobruk was entirely encircled.

However, I was not among those who executed this fine
forced march. The trickle of prisoners had, during the last days of the attack on Bardia, increased into a spate, and with the fall of the town we had taken a further 40,000, so I was detached from my battalion with a squad of men to help deal with them.

Although we worked night and day the herds of dejected-looking men in the wire cages were so great that the work of interrogation could only be carried out in the most perfunctory manner. All I could do, after glancing through their pay-book and private papers to pick up what I could of their peace-time background, was to pull out about one in twenty for ten minutes’ quick grilling and one in a hundred for special questioning by Intelligence at the base, owing to his Fascist connections or some other reason that made him one of the more interesting fish in our net.

During this time I had the benefit of a roof over my head, which was a great blessing in view of the coldness of the nights. The Navy had confined its bombardments of Bardia to the fortifications and harbour works, while the R.A.F. had loosed its bombs mainly upon similar objectives or troop cantonments, so the town had not sustained as much damage as we expected, and with several other officers I occupied half the house of a wealthy Arab.

His uncle had been one of the minor chieftains whom the playful Graziani had taken up in an aeroplane and flung out to be dashed to pieces on the rocks a thousand feet below, in order to induce the Arabs to accept Fascist culture, when he had been Governor-General of Libya in the days before the more clement and far-sighted Marshal Balbo took over. In consequence our host regarded the British as the liberators of his people, and he could not do enough for us; but by the 15th we had at last sorted out and despatched the best part of the Army Corps which had been taken at Bardia, and I was ordered to rejoin my unit outside Tobruk.

It took me all day to cover the seventy miles as the one road was chock-a-block with the reinforcements and supplies with which General Wilson was strengthening our advance forces, but I was back with my old friends, the New Zealanders, on the evening of Thursday, January the 16th.

Conditions with them were much the same as they had been outside Bardia, but Tobruk appeared to be a much stiffer proposition. It had a fine deep-water harbour and, with the exception of Benghazi, which still lay over two hundred and fifty miles to the west of us, was the most important city in the whole of Eastern
Libya. In addition to its strong fortifications an Italian cruiser and other warships lay in the harbour and were assisting the defence with their big guns.

Such heavies as we had been able to get up were pounding the place while our smaller calibre batteries barked and coughed at the strong points in the outer ring of the defences. All day long the aeroplanes droned overhead, some spotting for our batteries and others swooping to machine-gun columns of Italian lorries or concentrations of troops which were too far distant for us to see. It was grand to know that at least we had the mastery of the air in this campaign as on the rare occasions that Italian ’planes did put in an appearance they were always either shot down or driven off immediately. That made an immense difference, but the Italians here seemed full of fight and they had masses of ammunition. The guns roared day and night; shells whistled and screamed over, and there was hardly a moment during daylight when in one direction or another one could not see an Italian shellburst sending up a great fountain of sand.

Over the week-end we worked like niggers as orders had come through which indicated that the General Staff were now contemplating a direct assault on the city. Many batteries were moved forward almost into the fighting line, and we carried stores and ammunition up by hand during the nights to form dumps as near as we dared to the enemy.

On Tuesday, the 21st of January, the Navy, Army and Air Force attacked simultaneously at dawn. The cruiser in the harbour was shelled until it became a burnt-out skeleton. Five of the perimeter forts were taken, and in several places our troops penetrated the inner defences of the city. On Wednesday the 22nd, the flag on the Italian G.H.Q. was hauled down and Tobruk surrendered with a further 25,000 prisoners.

Once more my friends, overjoyed as they were by their victory, thought that the maximum possible profit had now been reaped from our offensive, and that we should have to sit down to consolidate our gains; but our General Staff in the Middle East seemed to have taken a leaf out of the Germans’ book and grasped the great lesson made so tragically apparent in the battles for Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. Defence was no longer superior to attack, except in quite exceptional circumstances and, given speed and imagination, there appeared to be no limit to the gains which might be secured by a victorious army providing that it was properly directed, and that the men composing it were prepared to march and fight until they dropped.

Within an hour of the fall of Tobruk General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson was calling upon his army for new efforts, and he did not call in vain. It was now just on seven weeks since the first assault had been delivered against Sidi Barrani, and during that time there had been no days off for anyone and barely even the time to keep ourselves and our arms reasonably clean. Few of us had a bath and sometimes we were unable even to wash for days at a stretch, but there were no grumblers. Home Forces, Australians, New Zealanders and Indians alike were all so elated by the smashing blows we were dealing the enemy that fatigue, dirt and discomfort were forgotten. All they asked was to be led on to further triumphs.

Once again I was left behind at Tobruk to help cope with the new flood of prisoners so I was one of the few lucky ones who was able to live for some days in a comfortable house where I could actually take my clothes off to sleep in bed each night and get a bath each morning.

By the Sunday following the fall of Tobruk our men were fighting in the neighbourhood of Derna, which was as far again along the coast as Tobruk had been from the frontier. This was much the most spectacular advance that had so far been made during any four days in this remarkable campaign, but it was to be far exceeded before the full triumph was completed.