Long Range Desert Group Page 22

  First two C.R. 42’s, then a recce plane, then six more fighters. From eleven o’clock till-dusk they made a day of it, bombing and machine-gunning the trucks and men, ill hidden in the low scrub. Two more men were wounded, one of them, Wilder, with bullets through both legs. In the heat of the attack Lawson worked at getting the wounded away to a safe spot, cheerful and inspiring. But one of them, Parker, was lying up in the truck shot in the stomach and took some time to move. So Lawson stayed with him, shifting from side to side as the aircraft swooped down and sheltering Parker with his own body. Happily for the wounded in the days to follow he escaped unhurt.

  By evening there remained one 30-cwt. and two Jeeps to take thirty-three men back to Kufra. The last blow of the day was the hardest of all. Jake, an old hand at this sort of game, had had all rations and water unloaded from the trucks in the intervals of the strafing. At dusk when the attacks seemed over, most of the rations were reloaded on to one of the two surviving Chevrolets. Then as the light was fading two more fighters returned, spotted the truck and set it ablaze.

  However, they had a last string to their bow for Jake on the way up before the raid had left at an old hiding-place of ours near Bir Gerrari, sixty miles south-east of Barce, a 30-cwt. truck with a load of petrol and hard rations.

  At nightfall on the 14th this was the position : The Doctor leaving for Bir Gerrari and Kufra in a Jeep and a 30-cwt. with six wounded men, a driver, a fitter and a navigator—Davis—and what a responsibility was his, to guide his party for 700 miles with no other instruments than two compasses, one magnetic and one sun : two walking parties setting off for the same destination and with them one Jeep carrying what rations and water remained.

  For the first few hours the going was so bad that the cars could make no headway and the Doctor and the walkers level pegged. Then Lawson had to abandon his Jeep; a bullet high up in the petrol tank had made a hole which leaked too freely. In the 30-cwt. he pushed on ahead. Soon the walkers’ Jeep seized up; in the darkness a rock had punctured the sump and all the oil run out. Two hours’ work repaired this and the party struggled on. Towards dawn at a roll call one man was missing. Dennis went back to the last halt where he had been seen, calling in the darkness, but no reply came; the missing man, exhausted, must have stopped for a moment and fallen asleep.

  All the next day the walkers pushed on, periodically flattening to the ground as searching aircraft passed and re-passed overhead. At dark a distant fire showed in a valley bottom; an Arab encampment where they bought and cooked a lamb and got milk to drink.

  On the 16th they found water, more than they could have dared to hope so far south of the coast in mid-September. Before dawn on the 17th cars were heard passing nearby and knowing that they must almost certainly belong to L.R.D.G. Jake fired Verey lights, but they did not stop. Dispirited, they walked on. An hour later at the top of a rise their troubles were over—below them in a hollow were Olivey and his Rhodesians having breakfast.

  That night they reached the car left at Bir Gerrari where a note from Lawson showed that he had taken some water and passed on. But of the second walking party, separated from the others in the darkness of the first night, there was no sign.

  For the next three days Jake and Olivey combed the area. First, some Arabs reported that the missing men had passed their way, staying two days for rest and food. Following their tracks a note was found, saying that two men were behind wounded and eight pushing on to Bir Gerrari. On the 19th the eight were found, split into three and five, and nearly at the truck. But of the wounded men there was no trace, and on the 21st the search was abandoned and the survivors headed south following the Doctor.

  At L.G. 125 they found Lazarus with two Guardsmen of Dennis’s party who had walked out of Barce and with the good news that the R.A.F. had evacuated the wounded. As they left for Kufra two aircraft appeared and bombed the airfield but the patrols, halted anxiously two miles away, escaped unseen.

  Two days later they were through the Sand Sea and at Howard’s Cairn where Arnold was waiting with food and patrol and on the 25th reached Kufra, roughly 2000 miles from the Faiyum by the route they had followed, just in time for a retaliation raid by the Luftwaffe.

  That was the end of “Hyacinth.” It had cost the Axis some thirty aircraft and perhaps the same number of casualties in Barce. It cost L.R.D.C. six wounded, all of whom recovered, ten prisoners of war and fourteen vehicles. Two D.S.O.s, one M.C. and three M.M.s went to weigh down our side of the scales.

  1 S1 and S2 here refer to the individual trucks of S patrol, not to the patrols themselves.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE ROAD WATCH

  AS YOU DRIVE westwards along the coast road from Agheila with the sun at your back, you see ahead, blurred in the heat haze, a white speck on the horizon appearing and disappearing with the undulations in the road. On the right, behind the white dunes of silver sand, is the Mediterranean; on the left the nondescript semi-desert of Sirtica, Later the speck turns itself into a tall narrow arch, straddling the Via Balbia, the Arco Philænorum to the Italians but to all the British Army the “Marble Arch.” A couple of hundred yards to the south-west is an Ara Philænorum, an altar to the Philæni, rebuilt by the Italians on the traditional site, and carved with a long quotation from Sallust’s Jugurthine War which tells this story.

  In the fifth century B.C. Carthage and Cyrene were rivals for the domination of the North African coast. Constant war raged between them, draining the strength and resources of both, and finally they decided to put an end to the strife and fix their common frontier once and for all.

  It was to be done thus. On a given day from each city a pair of runners were to set out and where they met the new frontier would be established. The runners from Cyrene are unknown but the Carthaginians were two brothers called Philæni who outran the Cyreneians so successfully that they met them far east of halfway between the two towns. The Cyreneians, fearful of retribution for their laziness when they got home, accused the Carthaginians of having started before the appointed time and proposed a new method of settling the boundary. The Carthaginians agreeing, the Cyreneians gave them the choice of being buried alive there, at the point where they claimed the boundary should be, or of allowing the Cyreneians to continue farther westwards to a point where they in turn should suffer the same fate. The Philæni chose to sacrifice themselves for Carthage and were buried alive at that place, where afterwards an altar was built to their memory.

  Here two thousand years later Mussolini, while adding to his desert empire, built an arch over the road, adorned with suitable reliefs of himself, and with inscriptions to preserve his memory :

  “BENITUS MUSSOLINI

  SUMMUS REI PUBLIGAE MODERATOR IDEMQUE FASCISTARUM DUX.”

  And inside the arch quotations from his speeches :

  “Il popolo Italiano ha creato col suo sangue l’impero, lo fecondera col suo lavoro e lo difendera contro chiunque con le sue armi.”

  which all sounded a bit thin in December, 1942.

  If slogans could win wars the Italian victory over us would have been a quick one. From one end of Libya to the other—on forts, barracks, colonists’ houses—were plastered in wearisome repetition : “Credere, Obedire, Combattere.”—“II Duce ha sempre ragione.”—“Duce vinceremo.”—“Noi tireremo diritto.”

  Hundreds of thousands of British troops have passed under the Marble Arch and stopped to wonder at it. Probably not one in a hundred thousand turned his eyes to the southwards at a point about five miles to the east. If he had troubled to do so he would have looked on to a flattish, gravel plain, a mile or so wide, covered with sparse scrub, and beyond, dancing in the mirage, a low escarpment with one or two narrow wadis opening out of it. An uninteresting view.

  But this spot also deserves a monument, the inscription on which would read :

  “HERE

  L.R.D.G. KEPT THE

  ROAD WATCH.”

  It was always known as the “Road Watch.” In Siwa i
n the spring of 1942 or in Kufra in the autumn of the same year a patrol commander, asked what his next job was to be, would answer you with little enthusiasm, “I’m on the Road Watch.” I think the idea in the first instance was Prendergast’s—to send a patrol up near enough to the coast road to take a census of all the traffic that passed along it. Here for a trial Week in September of 1941, for four and a half months with scarcely a break in the spring and summer of 1942, and for seven weeks in the autumn, day in and day out, for twenty-four hours a day, four hundred miles behind the enemy’s line, L.R.D.G. made a census of everything that passed along the road.

  I have described the place as seen from the north. Coming from the south one crossed an area of good going—undulating gravel desert—then bumped over the sand hummocks of the Wadi Scemmer and up on to the low plateau of Dor Lanuf from which the sea and the Marble Arch were in sight, then wound down one of the wadis which cut through the plateau to camp near the mouth where it ran out on to the plain. The plain itself was bare, but there was a little scrub in the wadi bed, enough to hide the cars when camouflage nets were well used.

  This was the drill. Before dawn two men started off from camp towards the road. Within four or five hundred yards of it they stopped, found what cover they could—a fold in the ground or a low bush—and there settled down for the day. Once down they had to stay there till nightfall; unless the traffic was very light they could not stand up or move about. With them they had high-power field-glasses, notebooks and up-to-date photographs of enemy M.T. and A.F.V.s. Taking it by turns one wrote to the other’s dictation, noting tanks, guns, lorries, oil tankers, armoured cars, tractors, stores, troops and sometimes sadder sights as the record for June ioth, 1942, shows :

  “Westbound. Estimated 500 P.O.W., Free French and R.T.R.”

  and the same number for some days afterwards, for these were the fruits of the fighting on the Gazala-Bir Hakim line.

  It was a weary task. Bitterly cold in winter; blowing dust in your face in spring; blistering heat in summer; from dawn at five to dusk at seven was a long, long day. As one watcher said cynically : “You look at your watch at n and look again four hours later and it’s 11.15.”

  There was never much traffic at night but at dusk the two men would move down closer to the road, to within fifty yards or less, and try to judge by sound and outline the types of vehicles which passed.

  Back in camp the rest of the patrol were killing boredom—a sentry on the hill, some men asleep, some reading or playing bridge. Before dawn next day the relieving pair of watchers would set out from the camp, passing the returning men unseen in the dark, to take over at the appointed time. At the camp after dark the wireless masts would go up and if tanks had gone by moving eastwards a signal would come to Group H.Q. at Siwa or Kufra and soon afterwards, perhaps when the tanks were nearing Agedabia, Ciphers at Middle East would be de-coding :

  “Flash from Tripoli road watch. Eastbound March 18. Tanks 6 Mark 3 and 1 Mark 4. Armoured cars German 4-wheeled 7. Italian Autoblinda 5.”

  And so it went on, day after day, for the normal spell of ten days, or maybe more if the relieving patrol was late. Then at nightfall the incoming patrol would be waiting at Two Cairns, the rendezvous, the change over would be completed and the watch would go on. And when the outgoing patrol was clear of the area and able to signal at leisure a full report would go back to Cairo with the totals of all the classes of traffic seen in the ten-day period.

  Consider what this meant to our Intelligence. There is only one road from Tripoli to Cyrenaica and everything that went along it we saw. Admittedly we missed the supplies landed at Benghazi (though not always),1 but it so happened that the Axis brought nearly all their tanks and reinforcements to Tripoli. Tanks were the things that the Intelligence people always worried about. Give them accurate numbers and types and they were happy. But they welcomed other details too. They would suspect, for instance, from other sources of information that the Littorio Division was leaving Italy. A few days or weeks later L.R.D.G. would report many fresh, unsunburned troops in clean uniforms moving eastwards with new transport, including perhaps field-cookers—which reinforcements or reliefs do not take with them. Fairly good confirmation of earlier suspicions.

  The watch was not always dull. There was one occasion when a party of school children in a bus drew up and started a game of rounders nearby and a second when two sportsmen from a staff car halted to shoot desert hares. And another when a German battery turned suddenly off the road and camped with its vehicles well dispersed around the watchers. It arrived at midday and the two men, Brown and Parkes I think they were, crouched for six hours under their khaki-coloured sheepskin coats speculating on life in a prison camp in Italy until at dusk they were able to move away unseen. Once a unit halted for firing practice, setting up their targets straight in line for the watchers. Then there was nothing to do but to get up and walk unconcernedly away, hoping to be taken for a wandering Arab.

  One day in May Holliman thought that the secret was out at last. He and his companion were writing busily behind a bush which they had uprooted and dragged forward nearer to the road when an Arab suddenly sat down beside them, picked up their waterbottle and took a drink. “Yes. Inglizi,” he said, “but don’t be afraid,” and true to his word never gave them away.

  We were always expecting that one day the disaster would come, that the whole patrol would be captured and the secret lost. But it was not really strange that this never happened when you consider how easily the enemy could have done (and perhaps did do) the same thing on the road between Alexandria and Matruh.

  In camp in the wadi they had fewer thrills but more annoyances. Arabs would wander by grazing their flocks; aircraft came hedge-hopping over the wadi banks; with weeks of occupation the ground grew foul and flies swarmed, for though they buried all their food tins for cleanliness and concealment, jackals dug them up at night. Once an inquisitive Arab witnessed the change over at Two Cairns and knowing then too much, was collected and brought protesting back to Siwa.

  It took three patrols to keep the watch going; one on the job, one going out and one returning, for the distance from Siwa by the route between’ Agheila and Marada was six hundred miles. In May, 1942, the enemy must have had some suspicions of the routes we were using into the Sirte Desert, for Croucher, returning to Siwa, found a party putting up a double-apron wire along the Marada-’Agheila road. After that the patrols had to go south of Marada, a hundred miles longer, but safer till the Italians started mining our old car tracks and S1 patrol had a car blown up and wrecked.

  Remembering T2 patrol’s walk back to Jalo,2 and against the day when disaster should befall we made a chain of dumps between the Marble Arch and Jaghbub, small depots at 25 mile intervals with water, map, compass, shoes and hard rations which might enable a party who had lost their cars to reach home.

  For four months in the spring of 1942 the watch went on. Then when Tobruk fell and Rommel could use that port as well as Benghazi the importance of Tripoli decreased and the watch was discontinued. In October Middle East asked for it to be resumed again and we guessed that something was in the air. Spicer with Y1 went up from Kufra to restart it and from October 30th to November 8th saw little of importance. But by November 10th, when Talbot had taken over, the westbound traffic was showing the effects of Montgomery’s victory at ’Alamein, and we began to have some inkling of Rommel’s intentions when lorry loads of civilians with their furniture showed that the Italian settlers were being evacuated from Cyrenaica.

  The salt marches at ’Agheila make one of the best defensive positions on the Libyan coast, difficult to force in a direct attack and not easy to turn from the southern flank. The Germans had stood on this line in January, 1942, and the question of the moment was whether they would do so again. At Middle East H.Q. Intelligence weighed the probabilities; at home Our Military Correspondent expounded the strategical pros and cons; fifty miles behind the front line R2 patrol sat and counted two to three
thousand vehicles a day going westwards and practically nothing moving east. Their last signal left the answer in little doubt :

  “November 8 to 14. Westbound. Motor cycles 528 and sidecar 18. Cars 1264. 15-cwt. 407. 30-cwt. 607. 3-ton 2316 and trailer 474. 5-ton 2697 and trailer 899. 10-ton 125 and trailer 117. Tractors 3. Transporters 2. Troop carriers 13. Tankers 23 and trailer 3. Tanks light 8. Armoured cars 24. Guns 68 mostly light A/T. Miscellaneous 400. Troops estimated 42,500—repeat 42,500.”

  Though the Axis evidently did not mean to make a prolonged stand at ’Agheila there were yet many troops about and by November 15th the area had become too hot for Talbot and he had to move. Sweeting with G2 relieving him re-established the watch forty miles farther west but even here it was difficult enough for he was amongst the rear units of Rommel’s forces.

  Middle East were now insistent that the watch must be kept going at all costs in order to give them information of the enemy’s intentions, so it was decided to double-bank the patrols on the job and Tinker (T2) and Timpson (G1) left Kufra on November 20th to do this.

  As I have explained, our old route between Marada and ’Agheila was no longer open and for some time past we had been sending the patrols through the Marada-Zella gap. But though they seem never to have known about the road watch the enemy were by now well aware that we were using this route and had put down minefields across the old tracks and were sending out patrols from Zella and Marada. On November 25th one of Tinker’s trucks ran over a mine north-east of Zella and Burke had his leg broken. He was brought back to Tazerbo and the little Waco earned its keep again when Barker went out from Kufra and collected him there.