The Majabra are an Arab tribe, with a mixture of Sudanese blood to judge by the dark faces of some of them, and are, or were, the most enterprising merchant caravaneers of the Eastern Sahara. They held a position rather like the merchant adventurers of Elizabethan England, for they were the great promoters of desert trade. All round the fringes of the desert you find the Majabra—in Jalo, in Benghazi, along the coast towns to Alexandria, in Kerdaseh below the Pyramids, in Khartoum, in El Fasher and in the towns of the French Sudan. And between these scattered tribesmen trade flows. A Majbri in Cairo will give you a draft on his agent in Fort Lamy and it will be honoured. We had not been long in Kufra in the summer of 1941 before the merchants there sent off a caravan of three hundred camels across the terrible Sand Sea route through Abu Mungar to Egypt to bring the merchandise which the oasis had lacked for so long. Until the Italians, with their totalitarian economy, closed the frontiers, entrepôt trade had made Jalo, like Petra and Palmyra two thousand years earlier, a “caravan city” of importance in Saharan trade.
But for most of us, drinking the nasty water, shivering in unheated rooms and plodding around in the soft sand, it was an unattractive place. “Doc” Lawson struggled with the filth and flies the Italians had left behind them; the periodical recce aircraft occasionally came low enough for us to blaze off at it and the patrols came and went. Our task was to harass the enemy as far as possible behind his front line which then was between Agedabia and Agheila. So Timpson with G2 beat up the Hon-Misurata road again; Easonsmith struggled across the north-eastern corner of the Harug and mined the Hon-Zella track—and got well strafed by two Savoias and a Ghibli while doing it—and Hunter took a party of parashots to attack Buerat el Hsun.
It was while we were at Jalo that the Heavy Section—as we called the Supply and Transport Section—really came into its own. Many L.R.D.G. officers had done a turn with the Heavv Section : I, the first, for one trip only, Holliman, Croucher, Morris, Sutherland, but it was Philip Arnold who really made it what it was. Philip had all the qualifications. Half-French, half-English, naturally perfect in both tongues and a good Arabic speaker too, there was little he did not know about getting trucks across the Middle Eastern deserts. He had worked for a firm in Aden, had sold cars in Abyssinia, served in the Foreign Legion in Syria, fought in some strange amphibious battles in the Somaliland campaign and in the summer of 1942 came to us. His last peacetime job was with an American mining company which was successfully extracting gold from the barren hills between Mecca and Medina. Philip ran their transport for them and once a month took the gold right across Arabia to be shipped from the Persian Gulf ports. It was a bad day for L.R.D.G., and for many other people too, when he ran his Jeep on to a land mine on the outskirts of Hon.
Perhaps we rather took our “Q,” problems for granted. We were always the best-fed unit in the Middle East; we were never really short of essential supplies; the mail used to turn up, often soaked in petrol or dieseline, but it arrived, and we seldom considered. how all this happened. That it did was due to Prender-gast’s thoughtful planning, to the Heavy Section, and even more to “Shorty,” the Prince of Quartermasters, and Bevan, his S.Q.M.S. “Shorty” was Barrett, New Zealander, nearing forty, a lawyer in peace time, in the first party of 2 N.Z.E.F. to reach Egypt, a foundation member of L.R.D.G., who left us to go through the fighting in Greece with his own “Div. Cav.” and then returned to be Quartermaster in the autumn of 1941 and in February, 1943, just to keep himself from idleness, took on the job of Adjutant as well.
The responsibilities of the L.R.D.G. Quartermaster were heavy and it was distance that gave them weight. The Quartermaster of an ordinary unit in the Western Desert drew his rations daily, sending his own transport back to the nearest D.I.D.,3 and it was unlikely that he would have to go more than twenty or thirty miles for most of the things he needed. Where he thought in days Shorty had to think in weeks or months. Where he had to go thirty miles Shorty had to go three hundred. In Jalo we drew our supplies from railhead at Misheifa, a week’s turn-round for the Heavy Section. From Siwa we sent to Matruh; from Zella and Hon we had to go to the Marble Arch or Tamet; at Kufra the R.A.S.C. brought us food and petrol from Wadi Haifa, but for anything else we had to send to Cairo, distant a thousand miles. Week in and week out small parties of the Heavy Section, a few three-tonners or two or three Macks, used to set off on journeys which were adventures in themselves. Before the war to reach Kufra from Cairo through the Gilf would have been a major expedition; in the summer of 1942 Clark, with three 3-tonners, did the trip in four days and nobody thought much of it.
Prendergast would ring up the Q.M. store. “Shorty, The brothers Y” (Y1 and Y2 patrols), “go out on Thursday. A month’s rations and petrol for 1100 miles. And three Heavy Section 3-tonners under Mitchell go with them for the first four hundred miles with petrol for their return journey. Will you fix it?”
Or else :
“Shorty. ‘A’ Squadron leave for Oliver’s Dump next week. When Zella falls they’ll go in there but they’ll want a week’s food and water while they’re waiting at Oliver’s. And we must build up a dump of 500 gallons of water and 4000 of petrol for the patrols attacking Hon and Sebha when they come back that way. Have you got that new lot of a thousand Jerricans?”
Or :
“Shorty. The Rhodesians are going down to Tibesti on the 17th. The French’ll feed them when they get there but they’ll need all their other stuff for, say, two months.”
And then there were all the other things we needed. Chapplies (Indian North-West Frontier sandals) as well as boots. Special petrol and oil for the Wacos. Theodolites for the navigators. Breda 20 mm. ammo. Vickers .5. Breda 12.7. Bofors 37 mm. Bofors 47 mm. Ammo, for the tank (we had a tank once!) 4.5 How. ammo. 25-pdr. ammo, (we had one of each of these guns for a time), incendiary, tracer, armour-piercing, explosive, Mills bombs, landmines, gelignite, sticky bombs, detonators, time pencils, fuse, Indian rations when the Indian L.R.S. was with us, Arab headdresses, smoke generators, camouflage nets, telescopes for the road watch, paint, sheepskin coats, sun-glasses, 44-gallon drums for storing petrol, Jerricans, water cans, tents, and always enough extra up the Q.M.’s sleeve to enable him to be a “universal aunt” to all the strange units who had business in the desert behind the enemy’s lines—Commandos, British and Arab; Parashots; lost travellers; “Escape scheme” promoters; stranded airmen; escaped prisoners—all at times needing petrol, rations, clothing and half a hundred other things.
Shorty was unrivalled in his ability to extract what we needed from reluctant supply officers : if he had persuaded the Navy to give him two minesweepers for use in the Sand Sea I would not have been surprised. Perhaps, like all good quartermasters, his methods of acquiring things were not always orthodox, but unlike many of them he never forgot, what should be written in all their hearts, that it is more blessed to give than to receive.
By mid-January Rommel’s counter-offensive at ’Agheila was gaining ground and by the end of the month our position in Jalo began to look uncomfortable. We asked Eighth Army’s advice, and on the 26th they told us to get out. It was heartbreaking to have to trail all the way back to Jaghbub and Siwa again, so we put off the evil day as long as possible by moving out of Jalo to Ghetmir, fifteen miles to the north-east. Here there was good water, good cover and a good position if we were attacked, but after waiting there for a week it was clear that we had no alternative but to move on. While we sat at Ghetmir, Timpson with his patrol remained to scorch the earth in Jalo, and by the time he had finished there was little left that would be of use to the enemy. From Ghetmir we could hear his explosions and see the clouds of smoke that hung over the oasis.
Rommel’s advance was too swift for us at one point. At Jalo we had to get our petrol from Msus and on the 24th January Richard Carr, then Adjutant, had left with a party to get a supply. As luck would have it there was no spare wireless to go with him and we could not warn him of the speed of the German advance. Msus was in German hands
by the time he got there and the whole of his party was captured. All that day they waited under guard and in the late afternoon started off for Benghazi, Carr in a staff car with three Germans and his men in a lorry behind. They had not gone far along the Sceleidima road when two armoured cars, I think of the 11th Hussars, opened fire on the small convoy. The men in the lorry fell upon their one guard, overpowered him and made a dash for it, and seven of them got safely away to the armoured cars.
Two or three of the men who failed to get away were right out of luck, for only a week or two earlier they had been saved from a different sort of fate when they were picked up, lost in the desert north-west of Aujila, by the small patrol which Prendergast kept out there as a screen for Jalo.
A good many men in the Eighth Army must owe their lives to L.R.D.G., but for every lost man found by us how many are still in the desert, now only a skeleton with a few rags of clothing round it and an empty waterbottle beside, and, maybe, with its teeth fastened in the dry stem of some desert shrub?
For a heedless, unthinking man it was terribly easy to become lost in the desert where, whichever way you look, the landscape seems the same. You drive over a ridge which hides your camp or the last known landmark, follow a track which you think will lead to your destination, do not bother to remember on which cheek the wind blew or where the sun’s shadow fell when you started, hurry on imagining that that cairn ahead, that bush, that low rise is a feature which you can recognise and in a few miles are thoroughly lost. Then is the time to force yourself to make no move at all for half an hour, till you have had time to sit down and reason out the situation and not, so strong is the temptation, push on because you feel so sure that just beyond that next ridge there is the place you seek.
Such a case was Driver X of the Y Motor Brigade, found by Olivey one hot May day in 1942 near Hatiet Etla and heading for Jalo, though he asked Olivey if he was on the right road for Matruh. He had one gallon of petrol left in his tank and had just drunk his radiator water, so his expectation of life at that moment was about twenty-four hours. Though X, a careful man, felt he had been the victim of foul play. He had left his unit to go back to draw water, turned his car and parked it facing the direction in which he must return, gone off to get authority for his water issue, and returned to the car and driven off. While he was away, X reckoned, some enemy had faced his car about to the wrong direction and hence his disaster.
Five months later, Holliman, going from ’Alamein to Siwa to guide home the garrison of Jaghbub, halted for a meal above the cliffs at Qattara Spring. A thousand feet below him in the Depression was a small party of men lost during the retreat from Solium. Holliman signalled to them and one man started to ascend the cliffs. For an hour he climbed steadily, at last arriving within sight of the Patrol. But one glance at the bearded Rhodesians was enough for him : these, he felt, must be Germans or some worse, new enemy, and in five minutes with a broken nose and foot he was down with his companions again. A Rhodesian descending reassured them and later they were delivered safely to Cairo.
S Patrol was apt to get landed with tiresome convoy tasks. In December, 1941, Reid, who had just taken Jalo, was in desperate need of petrol and Holliman had to guide a convoy there. He picked them up, a very raw collection of men just arrived from England, at Jaghbub and passed through the Wire that afternoon. The Wire, starting on the coast and running southwards as far as the Sand Sea near Jaghbub, 200 miles long, 6 feet high and 30 feet across, had been put up by Graziani at a cost of more than a quarter of a million pounds to stop gun-running from Egypt into Libya. It had been there since 1931 but the convoy, with memories of trench warfare in France, were sure that they were passing into No Man’s Land. New to desert driving, they got stuck wherever possible. When stuck they sat and waited for the “Desert Patrol” to dig them out, meanwhile washing their clothes in petrol as they had been told to conserve their water ration at any cost.
1 Gnr. E. C. Stutterd, 2 N.Z.E.F.
2 T6, T7, etc., here refer to individual trucks of T2 Patrol.
3 Detail Issue Depot.
CHAPTER TEN
SIWA AGAIN
BY February 1st we were back in Siwa, disappointed and sick at heart, trying to explain to the Siwans the value of the Eighth Army’s withdrawal to the “previously prepared positions” between Bir Hakim and Gazala and little thinking that in four months we should be leaving Siwa for ’Alamein.
But in spite of this and of the heat and flies and of the malaria which caught so many later on, life in Siwa had its compensations. For Siwa, so unlike Jalo, is all that one expects an oasis to be.
It was in 1935 that I first saw it. We had come up from ’Uweinat, four of us in three Fords—Ronnie McEuen, Mike Mason, Rupert Harding-Newman and I—along the west side of the Gilf to Wadi er Riquba and northwards through the Sand Sea. In much of the Sea the dunes conform to a type and after a few days digging and pushing you learn how to tackle them, but there is a ten-mile belt south of Siwa where they run all anyhow and the arrangement of the soft and hard sand patches does not follow the rules.
April 5th that year was hot and all day we had struggled through these fringing dunes. Towards sunset we mounted the last of them and below us was the long east-west trough in which Siwa lies, an alternation of salt lake and salt marsh with the villages on their hill-tops and the great palm groves between.
The dates are the best in Egypt, perhaps the best in North Africa, and as far away as Tripoli the Arabs say, “Ya tamr Siwa; ya laban Gargaresh.” 1 But best of all, when you come back from a May fortnight on patrol in Libya, are the pools—the Island Pool, the Sheikh’s Pool, Figure of Eight, Cleopatra’s, Bubbly Pool—with the warm artesian water, clear and sparkling, pouring up from a twenty-foot deep spring.
For a chairborne soldier as I was then life at Siwa was peaceful though there was plenty of work to do. “Siwa Bill,” the enemy recce aircraft, used to come over at a great height about every third day and once there was a moment of excitement when it dropped a stick of bombs, a near miss on Ashdown’s Ordnance workshops.
“Plugs” Ashdown for eighteen months, and later Mallinder, was our O.M.E. (Ordnance Mechanical Engineer). In the first months of L.R.D.G.’s life, when it was based on Cairo, the bigger repair jobs could be done in the workshops at Abbassia. But when we moved to Kufra this was no longer possible and Bagnold got Middle East to give him a Light Repair Squadron, R.A.O.C., known more familiarly after its master as the “Pluggeries.” In LR.D.G. work, driving over all types of country, the wear and tear on vehicles was very heavy. The limelight which fell on the patrols did not reach the “Pluggeries,” but in their unending and unromantic job of keeping the cars on the desert they had a large share in our successes. They had few idle moments. When they had the repairs for two patrols in hand a third would come in from the desert with the inevitable crop of broken springs, leaking radiators, severed U-bolts, loose steering and oil-drinking engines to change, followed by a message from Prendergast that X patrol must be ready for the road by Tuesday night.
From Siwa during the weeks that followed the patrols went in to Cairo by turns for leave and a refit. From the Western Desert the ordinary unit retired as a whole to the Delta after a period in the field, but it was an accepted principle of L.R.D.G. operations that some of the patrols were always at work.
In Cairo we behaved, I suppose, no worse if no better than any other unit. There were, of course, “incidents,” some of which ended in the Military Police barracks at Bab el Hadid. It was Y patrol, I think, who insisted on sand-channelling their way down the length of Sharia Suleiman Pasha to the fury of the police and the dislocation of the traffic. X will remember the incident of the bath and the lift shaft, and Z the night when he removed the bits from a row of cab horses and then retired to shout “Gharry, Gharry” from the pavement. Our reputation, never low, was high at the time and the red and blue L.R.D.G. shoulder patches were always good for a few free drinks. More than once we found men of other units wearing our ba
dges, which was flattering perhaps but not always desirable, as on the occasion when two men so adorned brought us into disrepute by stealing his accordion from a blind musician in the orchestra of some shady “dive.” The town Egyptians, an unlovable folk, made a walk through the streets of Cairo an unpleasant obstacle race. I have often wished that I could go through them placarded with two sandwich boards announcing that I did not want to buy a fly whisk, a stick, sun glasses, fountain pens, cigarettes, hair combs, dirty postcards, razor blades, handkerchiefs, or to hire a guide or have my shoes cleaned or accept any of the dozen other services so offensively offered.
It was on reconnaissance work that most of our time was spent in those busy months at Siwa in the spring of 1942.
And they were busy months. Siwa was then the “Clapham Junction” of all the behind-the-line traffic and there was a lot of it on the move. I wondered if the enemy had any idea how much there was; if he did have an observer in Siwa—and when the Army came back in the autumn some of the Siwans were arrested as enemy agents—he made little use of the information.
Day in, day out, the patrols came and went. To the road watch at the Marble Arch; to the other road watches in the Gebel Akhdar; taking Stirling and Mayne to Benghazi or Fraser to Barce; Timpson dropping a couple of Arabs to spy out the garrison of Jalo; Olivey carrying another pair to Agedabia; one patrol taking Pedlar and Knight to the western part of the Gebel; another Penman and his Arabs to the Obeidat country; Easonsmith off for a recce of Soluch and Sceleidima; Crisp bringing in an aircrew force-landed after a raid on Benghazi; Melot and Seagrim with their wireless sets leaving for Wadi Gattara; Lazarus off to survey the desert south of Jalo and the Heavy Section on its unending journeys to Matruh.
And from the verandah of the Rest House where Group H.Q. lived one might at times have been looking down from the control tower of an airport—at Bombays bringing parties of parashots and their stores; Lysanders with staff officers from Eighth Army; a Hudson to evacuate a sick man; a Wellington to pick up a crew we had rescued, and the Waco on its constant errands.
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