Long Range Desert Group Page 11
“We walked all that day and the next, keeping within sight of the sea and crossing several large wadis on the way. In the last of these we decided to spend the night, hoping to get some shelter from the bitter night wind off the sea, and in spite of the cold did manage to get a few hours sleep. We started off before dawn but after the first few miles my sandals gave up the ghost. I had been prepared for this and had picked up an old pair of boots. They were much too small, but I found them quite wearable after I had cut out the toe-caps and heels. About noon we met an Arab boy with three horses who told us there were some ‘Inglizi’ in a cave not far away. He offered us a ride and we soon reached an Arab camp near Ras et Tin. They gave us a great welcome and took us to a cave nearby where to our great delight we found three other British soldiers and a Canadian. They gave us a grand meal of bully, porridge and goat’s milk.
“Here we had the first good night’s sleep since Derna. Our feet were badly blistered so we decided to lie up and rest for a few days. We learned that nearby there was an officer and three other men, one of whom was badly wounded. They had hired an Arab guide and intended to try and break through the enemy’s lines and join our forces at Tobruk, so we moved up to their cave. Their plan was to get a boat sent along the coast from Tobruk to pick us all up, but after three days the Arab came back saying that their attempt had failed and that the officer and one of the men had been recaptured at Gazala. In the meantime two other officers who had escaped from Derna were brought in by the Arabs. At about the same time an Arab pedlar who had come from Tobruk through Acroma, told us that he had met no enemy patrols on the way. After much argument this Arab agreed to take the two officers back by the route he had come provided they wore Arab dress and paid him £30 each. They were to try and get a boat sent out for the rest of us.
“They went off, but after 14 days no boat had arrived and food was getting scarce, so the rest of us remaining decided to break up into small parties and try to reach Tobruk. The wounded man had recovered sufficiently to go with us.
“On the 22nd May the Canadian, his friend, Alfred and I started out. By midday we were standing on the escarpment which overlooks the old Italian seaplane base at Bomba. Before we could go further we had to cross the road at the foot of the escarpment along which traffic was passing continuously. We waited till the road seemed clear and were just about to make a dash across to the nearest cover when we heard a large lorry coming. It was impossible to go either way without being seen, and I thought to myself, ‘This is back to the prison camp.’ We dropped flat on our faces where we were. I watched the truck coming round the corner about a hundred yards away and lumbering slowly towards us. It was an open ten-tonner with a party of Italians in the back. My heart sank lower and lower, and as it drew level with us I waited to hear shouts from the truck to say that we had been spotted, but to my amazement it simply passed by without one of the party turning his head or looking in our direction. We did not wait to see if any more lorries were coming, but got up and ran as hard as we could for the nearest cover. This time we had a good look round before we moved on. After a few miles we stopped and shared two tins of bully and drank sparingly of our water.
“By late evening we sighted the white house at Tmimi which we intended to pass after dark. As it was still too light to attempt it we stopped and had a dip in the sea. As soon as it was dark we started off following the shore, but luck was against us this time and we kept running into large waterways which ran anything up to half a mile inland. Soon we were wet and cold trying to cross them, so we decided to give it up as a bad job and wait till first light to see where we were. We shared two more tins of bully and spent the rest; of the night walking up and down to keep warm.
“Daylight of May 23rd found us about two hundred yards from the white house which we had been trying to pass the night before. As there seemed to be no one about we made a dash for it and reached cover about a mile and a half beyond. We headed for the shore again and walked on untroubled till late afternoon when we sighted Gazala Point. Here we were held up by a party of Italians who were pumping water with a small engine about fifty yards from the shore. As our own supply was running short we decided to wait till dark and see if we could replenish our water-bottles. At seven o’clock the working party knocked off and went away in a lorry, except for two men who apparently lived in a tent nearby. We gave them an hour’s grace and then crept up to the well. As there was no way of obtaining water without going down, I lowered myself gently down the pipe till I reached the water and then the others let down the bottles on the end of a string. The water stank pretty badly, but we took a chance and drank our fill. Later we were to regret it.
“After three more hours walking we found ourselves in the middle of a large car park, and then the water which we had drunk began to have effect on our stomachs till our legs gave out altogether and we had to stop and rest. We had to get up the escarpment which we could see in front and so round the point, and it was nearly dawn before we reached the top, much too exhausted to go on any further.
“I was roughly awakened by Alfred who told me to take a good look round. At the bottom of the escarpment was the car park we had passed the night before; in front of us was Gazala landing ground covered with men and aircraft, and a few yards from where we were sleeping was the road on which a large lorry had appeared. There was only one thing for it, and that was to stay in the bushes and hope for the best. When the lorry had passed we buried ourselves deeper in the scrub and prepared to remain there for the rest of the day. As the sun rose we became very thirsty and by evening had drunk a full waterbottle which should have lasted two days. We set off again at dusk and crossed the landing ground, but after walking a few miles were too exhausted to go on and had to rest for the greater part of the night. We set off again before dawn, passing several camps in the early morning light.
“By midday on the 25th we were halted by another camp, right on the coast, but could not pass it till late afternoon when the men had finished swimming. After we had got by and walked on for a bit we decided to find some cover and try to sleep for the rest of the night. We made an early start next morning, passing several German camps in the semi-darkness, but once again we were halted by another camp at midday. These continual halts had been a great strain on our water and that afternoon I shared my last drop with Alfred, although at first he refused to take any, saying that he ought to have been more careful with his own. We decided that as soon as it was dark one of us would have to try and get water from the camp. The lot fell to me, so taking off what remained of my boots, I wrapped my feet in rags so as to make no noise on the rocky ground. Leaving the other three on the shore I managed to reach one of the trucks without being seen, and had just spotted a couple of likely tins when a German popped his head round the corner and no doubt said in his own language, ‘What the Hell are you doing?’ I did not wait to tell him but beat it for the shore as fast as I could with the German in full cry after me. In the dark I missed the others so could only make my way along the beach and hope that they would catch me up later on. Meanwhile the German’s yells had roused the whole camp. Men were shouting and dogs barking and rifles being let off. Gradually the noise died away as I got further off, and when I was out of earshot I flopped down on the sand, absolutely dead beat. I stayed here some time, hoping the others would catch me up, but at last I gave it up and staggered off along the coast. The rags had fallen off in the mad rush and my feet were cut to ribbons on the sharp stones. To keep myself going I had to roll constantly in the sea which made me cold and wet and forced me to keep walking to get warm again. Later on I was lucky to run into an Arab camp. I woke up an Arab who gave me a piece of stale bread and filled my water bottle. Again I made the mistake of drinking too much and was doubled up with pains in the stomach for the rest of the night.
“On the 27th I was too weak to move more than a mile or two and spent the rest of the day and the following night trying to sleep; also my water had sunk to a very low level
again and my mouth was too sore to eat the remains of the bread which the Arabs had given me.
“I started early next morning but the coast was becoming more rocky, intersected with deep wadis. Having no boots and walking 011 the rocks in my bare feet slowed down my progress so much that by midday I had scarcely made four or five miles. Then ahead of me I could see an M.G. post which meant that I was held up again till nightfall. Later I learned that it was the German front line. I found a small cave among the rocks and stayed there for the rest of the day. My water had dwindled to a wee drop in the bottom of the bottle and it was all I could do to stop myself drinking it. I could feel my resistance going and began to see things, my mind wandering. It seemed as though the sea was mocking me and I wanted to get into it and swim and swim and swim. Another time I thought I would go to the outpost, only five hundred yards away, and give myself up, and I actually got up and started to walk there but realised what I was doing and persuaded myself to go back to the cave again.
“The hours dragged by and at last the sun set and it was safe for me to move again.
“All night I crawled up and down the wadis on my hands and knees as my feet were too badly cut to bear my weight. Sometimes I wandered up and down the wadi beds with the crazy idea that I might find water. I found a cactus and breaking off one of the leaves pulped it between two stones and sucked it. It tasted bitter and made my mouth and throat terribly sore, but it did ease my thirst a bit. I crawled out of this wadi only to find myself on the top of another one. Far below I could see the rollers breaking on the white sand. Slowly I crawled to the bottom and began to walk across the beach. Suddenly I dropped flat by sheer instinct.; in front of me were rows of barbed wire. I lay still but nothing happened, so I crawled slowly up to it and still there was nothing to be seen or heard. It did not penetrate my muddled brain that I had reached the British front line. I crawled through the wire and started up the other side of the wadi. I had got about half-way up when I heard voices and lay still to see if I could make out what they were saying. I tried to think what I would do if it was the enemy, as in my present condition it was impossible to go back or forwards. At last I could stand it no longer : I had to find out one way or the other so I let out a loud shout. Instantly the skyline was lined with men and bayonets, I could hear the bolts drawn back and click and a very un-English voice shouted, ‘Come on, come on up.’ I shouted back to them to hold their fire and scrambled to the top. Two men promptly grabbed me by the arms and another shone a torch. ‘English,’ I gasped, and the voice behind the light said, ‘No English.’ I was so relieved to be safe that I sat down and nearly cried my eyes out. As soon as I had explained who I was and where I had come from the Indians, for it was an Indian unit, could not do enough for me. They gave me hot tea and sugar and chupatties and fetched the officer in charge. I asked if three other men had come in but they had seen nothing of them. One of them gave me his blankets and curled up in them I had the first real sleep for five weeks.
“At dawn the sergeant woke me and told me that an Australian and two other men had come in. I was so overjoyed at seeing Alfred again that I had another good cry feeling a hell of a lot better after it. He told me that after I had been chased out of the German camp they stayed where they were all that night and the next day, waiting to see if I had been captured. The same night they started off again and found the Arab camp where they learned that I had passed through, so they rested there for a day, arriving only a few hours after me. The captain of that sector asked us to breakfast and gave us fishcakes, bread and real butter and jam, and to finish it off a bottle of beer and a packet of Players. Later on in the day a truck arrived to take us to H.Q. in Tobruk. In the evening the four of us parted for our various units. I caught a submarine chaser going to Alexandria, where I arrived three days later. Five days after that I joined Y patrol again in Siwa and so ended my capture and my escape from Derna.”
All the summer of 1941 Mitford had “A” squadron at Siwa under command of Desforce. I have not had access to all the records of that period and since I never went up from Kufra to Siwa I have no firsthand knowledge of the operations of the patrols. But stories used to find their way down to Kufra. We heard of Crichton-Stuart out on a reconnaissance of the country round Marada at the time when the Germans first appeared in Cyrenaica. By the time he turned homewards the enemy had taken Msus and were nearing Mechili, and the petrol dumps at which he had hoped to re-fuel were in German hands or had been destroyed by us. His journey ended short of Jaghbub with eighteen men in one truck and a twenty-mile walk to finish up with.
Of “Jake” Easonsmith3 too tales began to reach us in Kufra. I first heard them from two Arabs; they could not manage his name and thought I was rather stupid not to know it, for surely every one had heard about his exploits; the Arabs up north, they said, called him Batl es Sahra, the Hero of the Desert.
The main task of “A” squadron in the early summer was to keep a watch on the enemy’s southern flank, working up the Wire from Jaghbub, and in the oasis itself to try with much ostentatious driving to and fro to bluff the enemy reconnaissance aircraft into thinking that there was a much larger force in the oasis than the fifty odd men of G and Y patrols.
In June a proper garrison came to Jaghbub and the patrols were free to do real L.R.D.G. work again. Then began those journeys to the southern side of Gebel Akhdar which continued so successfully for the next eighteen months. There can have been few weeks during that period when some L.R.D.G. patrol, based on Siwa or Kufra or even on the Faiyum, was not out in the area between ’Agheila and Tobruk.
Jake carried out the first of these patrols. Its intention was threefold—to get an idea of the strength of the enemy reserves in the Gebel, three hundred miles behind the front line which was then at Solium; to discover which were the most important lines of communication in use, and to contact the Arabs of Cyrenaica and learn what amount of assistance we could expect from them. Of the three the last was perhaps the most important, for it started a partnership between the Arabs and the British which lasted till Cyrenaica was finally cleared of the Axis in December, 1942.
Part of the credit for establishing such a partnership must go to L.R.D.G., alias “Libyan Taxis Ltd.,” guaranteed to transport passengers and goods on request to any point in Libya. But equal credit is due to the men whom we delivered to the enemy’s back door—Haselden, Pedlar, Penman, Seagrim, Knight, Guignol, Melot, Flower, Losquier, Mackintosh, Lee Smith, Tarrant, Lewis—to mention only those whose names4 I can remember now. From Egypt most of them—schoolmasters, cotton brokers, business men or bankers—they won the confidence of the Libyan Arabs and, retained it through months of reverses and retreats.
In July Jake was up near Gambut, nearer than usual to the rear of the Axis positions at Solium, trying to locate dumps of petrol, food and ammunition. His patrol had halted for the night and the cook was brewing up. Jake, strolling over a nearby ridge while waiting for supper, found himself looking down on to an Italian mobile workshop, spread out in a fold in the ground. It was still quite light and he waited till the matter in hand—supper—was finished, and then with three cars attacked the unsuspecting Italians. It was soon over. All the enemy save two bolted immediately. These, having surrendered, begged a moment’s grace to collect their kit and, while they were fetching it, the patrol wrecked ten Diesel trucks and the workshop lorries.
At meal times on the way back to Siwa the cook, as was his usual practice, would dig a small hole for his fire, The first two or three times he got out his spade for this Ugo and Christo, panic-stricken, flung themselves on their knees and begged for mercy. It took a day or two to convince them that he was not about to dig their graves!
One day in August an Arab brought word to Siwa that a wounded British pilot was hiding near Bir Bidihi, a desert well a hundred miles inside enemy territory. A patrol went off to bring him in but at the place described there was no sign of any pilot. After searching for a time they found the mouth of a rock-cut cistern,
dry after the long summer. As a last chance they shouted down this and to their surprise out scrambled an Arab, very frightened and denying all knowledge of British pilots. The patrol’s hopes fell again when suddenly from the cistern mouth appeared a bald, pink head followed by the smiling face of the missing airman. “Why did you say he wasn’t here?” demanded the patrol. “Oh,” said the Arab, “only yesterday he was telling me that the English soldiers never had beards, so I thought you must be Germans.”
On October 14th Jake left Siwa on the last of his operations before the November offensive began. His “tasks,” as the Operation Order called them, were to make a “going” reconnaissance of three patches of country across which the Eighth Army might want to move later on; to pick up John Haselden returning from some expedition with his Arabs into the Gebel, and to drop some “doctored” Italian ammunition on any suitable desert track.
Jake had two alternative rendezvous with Haselden. He was not at the first, though hiding with some Arabs nearby were three British soldiers escaped a week before from the prison camp in Benghazi and very glad to be in safety again. So Jake went on to the second rendezvous near ’Ain Bu Sfeia. Not finding Haselden there either he hid his trucks, took three days’ rations, and went off alone on foot to scour the country round. (Haselden came in to the trucks while he was away.)
Jake, in his search of the countryside, found a large enemy camp near ’Ain Bu Sfeia and, lying up for a day watching the traffic on the track which ran towards Mechili, realised that there was an abnormal amount of enemy transport on the move. This could only mean that reserves were being brought forward from the Gebel, and it was of the first importance to get more details. So he decided to arrange an ambush three or four miles beyond the camp and try to take a prisoner for interrogation.
His plan was this. With two of his three trucks placed on rising ground which commanded the track, he with the third would have a “breakdown” on the route and hold up a vehicle for help.