Long Range Desert Group Page 21

  Early on the morning of the 14th we realised that the Tobruk raid was unlikely to succeed. Soon afterwards a signal came in from Lazarus with “Snowdrop.” The two S patrols had been led into impassable country in the dark by a stupid Arab guide and when dawn came it was too late for them to attempt the attack on Benina airfield.

  Three hours later Lazarus signalled again.

  “Since previous signal S11 completely gutted. S2 badly shot up. Both by aircraft. No casualties. Still no news Stirling.”

  Stirling had, in fact, fared no better than Haselden. His force had approached Benghazi from the south-east but on the outskirts of the suburb of Berka had met strong enemy positions and had no alternative but to withdraw. All the next day they were attacked by aircraft in the Wadi Gamra, forty miles south-east of Benghazi, and lost a lot of cars. In the succeeding days they made their way back to Kufra, some joining up with the Sudan Defence Force withdrawing from Jalo.

  At Jalo things were not much better. The S.D.F. had left Kufra on September nth. By the 14th they had reached the advanced base, “Middle Lift Wadi,” where Edmundson and our rear party had lain up during the reconnaissance of the Sirte desert fifteen months before. On the late afternoon of the next day the column drove out of the cover of the wadi on to the bare gravel desert which stretches northwards to Jalo. So far they had not been spotted but if they were caught by aircraft here the attack would be over before it had started. But by nightfall all was well. Fifteen miles from Jalo they halted while Carr, the Y2 navigator, took a set of star sights to check the position. Then on to the western edge of the palms, still apparently unseen.

  Three columns started off on foot in the dark, each led by an L.R.D.G. guide. All went well to within a hundred yards of the village and fort, but there Italian sentries challenged and it was clear that they had not been taken unawares.

  Confused fighting went on till dawn. The S.D.F. got into the north fort but were driven out again and at first light our forces had to withdraw. For the next four days they held the western edge of the oasis, shelling and being shelled by the enemy. They had no supporting aircraft and had a bad time from the air.

  The short siege of Jalo had its lighter side. Arabs crawled from palm to palm between the shell bursts to sell the attackers eggs and chickens, and one optimist presented a claim for a palm tree damaged by gunfire. With all the enthusiasm of a true surveyor John Willie Wright, dodging the bomb bursts, strove to complete the map of the oasis which he had begun to draw at Kufra, using the R.A.F. photographs of a year before.

  During the early hours of the 20th, just before a second attack was due to start, Middle East gave orders for the operation to be broken off and for the force to return to Kufra.

  It is easy to write wisely after the event, but as soon as we knew that the attack on Jalo was not to coincide with those on Benghazi and Tobruk, we felt that it had little chance of success. In Cairo we had stressed the need for simultaneous action, and up to the last moment had been told that this would take place. The need for it was obvious enough. The enemy would know immediately that the attacks on Benghazi and Tobruk had been made by ground forces. They would know that the Qattara Depression routes were closed to us; even if they knew of the Garet Khod route, which I doubt, they would realise that the one past Jalo was one of the only two left open. Obviously they would warn the Jalo garrison of the possibility of an attack, either by Stirling on his way back from Benghazi or by other forces from Kufra. And this is just what happened. The fact that a hundred odd vehicles got through the Jalo gap unseen shows that the Italians were asleep at that time; the reception the S.D.F. got a few clays later shows that by then they had woken up.

  But for us the worst of all was the lack of news from Easonsmith and “Hyacinth” of whom we had last heard on the evening of the 13th, just before he was going in to attack. On the 14th we heard nothing. On the 15th nothing, on the 16th nothing. In their tarpaulin shelters at the Faiyum the sweating signalmen fingered their frequency dials, sickened with our endless inquiries, “Heard anything of ‘B’ Squadron?” The best we could hope for was that all his wirelesses had broken down; at the worst both patrols were wiped out or “in the bag.”

  Then at 11.10 on the 17th Olivey spoke up. “Jake and twelve men found. Doctor with one truck and six wounded may now be at L.G. 125. From there heads for Kufra. Get aircraft to search. Details later.”

  And later the details.

  “Doc. left Barce area with 30 cwt. night 14th for Kufra via L.G. 125. Navigator Davis. Tell Lloyd Owen hurry L.G. 125 try pick up tracks also R.A.F. if poss. Doc. will skirt Sand Sea to Kufra probably non-stop. Several serious wounds.”

  Translated, this meant that Lawson in one car with nine men of whom six were wounded had left Barce three days before on his 700-mile journey to Kufra and might now be anywhere along that route. An interesting problem of the needle-haystack type—except for the wounded.

  Lloyd Owen, back from Tobruk, was lying up at Hatiet Etla seventy miles from L.G. 125, and at the first signal we had started him off. At the second we asked the R.A.F. at Kufra to search the edge of the Sand Sea northwards from Zighen. If the Doctor had been going non-stop he should be well south of Jalo by then.

  Before the R.A.F. could start from Kufra, Lloyd Owen had got to L.G. 125. On the evening of the 17th he signalled :

  “Arrived L.G. 125. Lawson here. Plane urgently needed for wounded. State E.T.A. and landing requirements.”

  We knew there were some Bombays at Kufra and had warned the R.A.F. of what was on. They were ready in a few hours.

  “E.T.A. L.G. 125 1100 G.M.T. rpt. 1100 G.M.T. 18/9,” their signal said.

  But to Expect to Arrive at L.G. 125 was not to get there, and whatever Stevenson might say, travelling hopefully was no use to us. From Kufra it was 450 miles over desert as barren and featureless as any in Libya, and that is saying a mouthful.

  Sitting at the Faiyum waiting for a signal the afternoon seemed unending. Time went backwards rather than stood still. Again and again I went over the journey in my mind’s eye. The first hundred miles stretch would not be so bad. With fair visibility one would see the high peak of Gara Thalma, a hundred miles north of Kufra, the first landmark we used on the Kufra-Siwa flight. After Thalma it would be a navigator’s hell, mile upon mile of serir, fiat gravel plain, with nothing to take a drift sight against and no landmark the size of an egg to recognise. Then the northern edge of the Sand Sea, a useful check on latitude but no help with longitude or drift. Then undulating stony desert for another 40 miles.

  Nearing the L.G. it would be better, as about ten miles south of it is a huge sand dune—Mont Thèrese, named after the wife of someone in Reid’s force which took Jalo from Jaghbub in November, 1941. And on the L.G. itself, which “A” Squadron from Siwa had discovered for the R.A.F. a year before, the burnt-out Blenheims and broken Hurricanes of the autumn operations would show up from the air. But roughly it was like finding a cricket field in Inverness-shire from Croydon, with one check, if visibility was good, on the way.

  The afternoon dragged on. At two o’clock (11.00 G.M.T.) there was nothing from Lloyd Owen. At three we were anxious. At four almost in despair. Then at 4.30, “Aircraft left at 12.45 carrying Doctor and wounded.”

  At 6 p.m. the next day they were in Cairo, forty-nine hours after Lloyd Owen had found them. A fine bit of work by 216 Squadron R.A.F.

  It was all in the Two-Sixteen tradition. The squadron had been flying over the Libyan Desert ever since I could remember; they started, I think, in the Great War. In our desert expeditions of the ’thirties they did us many a good turn, with Penderel (killed in England a week before I wrote this chapter) flying their Valencias and bringing us beer to ’Uweinat or tyres to Kharga. Penderel was an air ace of the last war with, I think, twenty-three Huns to his credit. Afterwards, in Egypt, he had caught horizon fever like the rest of us and used his skill and opportunities to push the first line of landing grounds down past the Gilf to ’Uweinat. In 1933 with
Clayton he had been by car across to Kufra.

  The tradition carried on to the Nazi War. The Valencias gave place to Bombays and the Bombays to Hudsons but Two-Sixteen Squadron remained masters of the desert sky, taking Stirling and his parashots to Jalo, ferrying supplies for the French when they attacked Kufra, evacuating our wounded, bringing us stores to Siwa and all this but a fraction of their everyday work for Middle East.

  Weeks afterwards, from Jake’s official reports, from tales told in the New Zealand Hospital, from Lawson’s diary and from Findlay when he returned to us in October after living for a month in the Gebel, I got the whole story of the Barce raid, the best “beat up” L.R.D.G. ever did.

  The accidents in the Sand Sea had delayed them and they had no time to spare. From Big Cairn they hurried across the fast going of the serir, then had a day’s pushing through the centre of the horseshoe of sand where Steele had first found a way in 1940. On September 10th, the patrols, so far unseen, came out of the northern edge of the Sea. The dunes here end abruptly in a straight east-west line, as if tidied up by a giant’s broom. At their foot runs the old caravan route from Jalo to Siwa, the route of the Majabra traders, scores of camel tracks meandering across the soft gravel. Then 200 miles over country we knew so well, at first bare and plantless, then, with the beginning of vegetation, the low sweet-scented desert shrub the smell of whose wood makes the evening fire worth all the suffering of the day’s heat. Then rolling “downs” with taller bushes, then the foothills of the Gebel, with warped pines which remind you of southern Greece and a few birds and Arab shepherds with their flocks.

  On the morning of the 13th Jake pushed on with Penman and two of his Arabs and dropped them a few miles south of Barce. Here the Arabs would contact their own tribesmen, learn what they could of the garrison, and meet the patrols coming up for the attack that evening at Sidi Selim. On the way back to the patrols Jake met a private car going northwards. It was an anxious moment but a friendly salute disarmed the driver’s suspicions and he drove on.

  Fifteen miles south of Barce the party halted for the afternoon. Jake explained his plans in detail, guns were cleaned, belts filled, grenades primed and after a meal they set off.

  It was a dark, moonless night when they hit the Gerdes el ’Abid track, cut the telephone wires and turned northwards. At the police post at Sidi Raui a soldier came out into the road and challenged. Jake switched on his lights and the man, dazzled, was soon disarmed and put on a truck. This was Hamed, a cheerful Tripolitanian, who spent some months as a scullion in our cookhouse till he was delivered to his home near Tripoli in March of the next year.

  There was movement in the police post and Jake, as if seeking help for Hamed, called “Ta’ala henna. Ta’ala henna!” (“Gome here. Come here!”) This produced an Italian officer who ran out blinded into the car lights and was shot down. Excited noises from the building showed that the garrison was getting away over the back garden wall and our men, prowling in, found nothing but a dozen horses.

  In this sudden halt at Sidi Raui two trucks collided and had to be abandoned. At Sidi Selim, five miles farther on, Penman was waiting but his Arabs had not returned; in any case they had hardly been given enough time.

  At Sidi Selim the Doctor was left behind as a rear rallying point and with him the T patrol wireless truck to keep a wireless watch for Stirling at Benghazi. The others pushed on to the main road and turned westwards.

  Five miles out of Barce at the top of the escarpment were two Italian-light tanks, parked one on each side of the road. The lights of the cars deceived them and till they were level they could not tell friend from foe. L.R.D.G. gave them all they had got and had no more trouble from the tanks.

  At the cross roads outside Barce Jake stopped and sent each party off on their job; Penman with one car remained behind to deal with any pursuers.

  Wilder with T1 patrol had the biggest task, to raid the airfield which air photographs taken a few days earlier had shown to be in full use. Skirting round the outskirts of the town he came to the landing ground, beside the road which leads to Maddalena. At the entrance Wilder stopped, jumped off his truck, opened the gate and drove in. Some Italians appeared running and were shot down. Then the New Zealanders had some luck; a big petrol tanker caught fire and lit up the whole town. Back at Sidi Selim the glare in the sky told the Doctor that things had started well.

  Moving on, Wilder found himself among the Mess buildings, threw some grenades into the windows and turned on to the landing ground.

  He now had five trucks, a Jeep and four 30 cwts., for one was damaged at Sidi Raui and the wireless truck was listening for Stirling. In single file he led the patrol round the airfield firing incendiary at each machine in turn. In the last truck Craw, with a load of short-delay-action bombs, dealt with any aircraft which did not catch fire.

  Meanwhile the Italians were firing wildly in all directions but without any result whatever; towards, the end they got a mortar going from near the Mess but had no better luck.

  After about an hour of this Wilder had visited in turn thirty-two aircraft, of which twenty were definitely alight and the rest damaged. When his ammunition was running short he left without a man having been hit.

  A long, straight road runs from the airfield through Barce town to the railway station. By this time the Italians had been able to pull themselves together and at the far end of the road were two tanks firing down it, their shots luckily all going high. There was no time to turn and no way round, for the tanks blocked the road, so Wilder in the leading Chevrolet stood on the accelerator and charged. Crashing into one tank he pushed it aside and cannoned into the other. This cleared the road but wrecked his truck. The crew scrambling to their feet thrust grenades under the tank tracks, someone (Dobson, I think it was) tried to drop one down the turret but found it shut.

  The Jeep following into this shambles picked up the Chevrolet crew and dashed on down the road. At the station turn the driver, blinded by the tracer which Wilder was firing, hit the kerb and overturned. When they had picked themselves up Wilder was found pinned down by the Jeep, soaked in petrol and unconscious. The next truck behind righted the Jeep, picked him up and got out of the town. But Craw and his crew in the last car had been cut off and were not seen again.

  Meanwhile the Guards under Sergeant Dennis, who had taken command of the patrol in Timpson’s absence, were dealing with the other end of the town. His job was to attack the barracks and keep busy any troops who might interfere with Wilder. The hospital lies between the barracks and the town and here two armed sentries stepped out and challenged. Dennis rolled a four-second grenade between them and turned them from sentries into patients.

  Farther on he came to the barracks where two more sentries shared the same fate. A man fired from the roof and got all the patrol’s gunfire in return. Then Dennis and his party hurried through the barrack buildings, throwing grenades into doors and windows and into the slit trenches from which the Italians were shooting wildly. Ammunition finished, he withdrew, meeting two tanks on the way with whom he played hide and seek for a time in the hospital grounds. In the darkness one truck under Findlay became separated from the rest. In October he rejoined us at Kufra—but that is another story.

  While all this was going on Jake was playing a lone hand. Having seen the patrols off to their tasks at the entrance to the town he drove in in his Jeep. On the east were some buildings which looked like officers’ quarters, small detached bungalows standing in a courtyard, and from one of these light showed through the window cracks. Stumbling around the flower beds Jake sought in vain for an entrance for his Mills bombs. In disgust he threw one on to the flat roof, which at least put the lights out and the fear of God into the occupants, and retired in search of other targets. These came in the form of two tanks parked in a small square. He opened fire with two twin Vickers K’s which disconcerted the tank crews and made them slow in pursuit. Having parked his Jeep in an alleyway he started on a tour of the town. In what seemed
in the dark to be some sort of market place, a building with arcades and pillars, he ran into a party of Italians and for a time chased them around the columns, bowling Mills bombs among their legs. The Italians soon tired of this, so Jake recovered the Jeep and moved on till he found an M.T. park with a dozen unattended vehicles in it and here with grenades and Tommy-gun fire he and Gutteridge, his driver, wrecked all the cars.

  By now the night was nearly over and it was time to collect our forces and withdraw. The tanks which had been guarding the escarpment had vanished and by 4 a.m. the party was reunited at Sidi Selim, with three Jeeps and seven 30-cwts. of the total of twelve vehicles which had gone in the night before.

  The next thing was to collect the trucks abandoned at Sidi Raui and towing chains were got ready.

  But during the night the Italians there had made a plan. South of Sidi Selim the track runs through a narrow valley and as the patrols passed through this in the half light of dawn a heavy fire burst on them from the roadsides. For a moment things were very unpleasant; two men were wounded in the leg, a bullet took off Penman’s little finger, and another punctured the Doctor’s car. In front of him Dennis halted, turned his truck back, and covered them while they changed the tyre. In the end they got through the ambush, picked up the trucks at Sidi Raui and drove on.

  A few miles farther on they stopped to get the damaged trucks going under their own power, for it would be impossible to tow them across country. The Tripolitanian Arab troops appeared again and started to interfere. Jake went off in his Jeep, outflanked them and drove them off. By the time he got back the trucks had been mended and the party started on. But after a few miles the G patrol wireless truck stripped a rear axle pinion and stood immovable on a bare hill top.

  It is a commonplace that the dissipations of the night before bring the headaches of the morning after. As Morris had found at Nofilia, Hunter at Fuka and many patrols at other times, the comparison was applicable to L.R.D.G. To-day it was the same. At that moment, before the disabled truck could be dragged under cover, the fighters arrived.