War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel during the Western Desert Campaign, 1942-3
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Source: C. G. Jefford, RAF Squadrons, 2001.
Part travel book – but travel, first, as a troopship experience, and, secondly, as military manoeuvres – part RAF memoir, this account merits publication because it records what has rarely, if ever, been described before, certainly by the participant of a radar unit under battlefield conditions. ‘On Draft’ deposits Fred back into the military version of the working class, while ‘Erk in the Desert’ recounts the daily experiences of Unit 606, which he must have equated subconsciously to the shared joys and sorrows of the working class in his colliery village. The experiences are raw, and the location of the author while in the desert is close to the key events. Moreover, Fred’s clarity of expression, and his skill in organizing his material make this an accessible and coherent story – and an unsentimental one at that.
Fred’s educational background and civilian career
Fred Grice spent the greater part of his adult life in Worcester, but the inspiration for much of his writing came from his childhood years in Brandon and Durham. He was born in 1910 in Brandon, where his father was a miner. At the age of eleven he won a scholarship to Durham Johnston School, where he developed a deep love of English Literature, that stayed with him for the rest of his life. After graduating in English with first-class honours from King’s College, London in 1931, he returned home to the north and spent a happy year at Hatfield College, Durham University, where he obtained a teaching qualification and coxed one of the college boats.
By 1941 Fred, now married to Gwen, and with a daughter, Gillian, was teaching English at the A J Dawson Grammar School in Wingate, when he was called up into the Royal Air Force and subsequently posted to North Africa. When he was demobbed in 1946, Fred had spent almost three years in Africa, the latter part as a Flight Lieutenant in the Education Corps based at Eastleigh near Nairobi. 1946 marked a watershed in Fred’s life, for he was appointed to a Lectureship in English at the newly-opened Emergency Training College in Worcester, and the family, plus a second daughter, Erica, moved to the West Midlands.
Before long, Fred became Head of Department at the now permanent college (today the University of Worcester) and devoted himself to the two things he loved most – teaching and writing. He was also active as a lecturer both within the city and at Welland, near Malvern. The first signs of a yearning for the life he had left behind in the North of England are evident in Fred’s later journals. Here he began to record the world of his childhood, re-creating with great accuracy everyday conversation, but above all, paying homage to the unsung bravery of men like his father, who spent the greater part of their life underground in discomfort and danger. The journals published here may be thought of as precursors to his post-war preoccupations as a writer.
He recalled:
I was born in the North East of England, in the far north, within hearing distance of the bells of Durham Cathedral. My father, who was a miner, worked in a small colliery a few miles out of Durham. I always think that I had the best of three worlds: the world of the pit village with its strikes, lock-outs, evictions and accidents, and the warm company of a close-knit neighbourly community; the world of the beautiful mediaeval city of Durham, where I went to school, a city of fine architecture and novel traditions of piety and erudition; and the world of the austerely beautiful and unspoilt countryside that encircled the colliery village, merging into the lonely dales to the west and the borderland moors of Northumberland to the north (Commire 1974, 96).
Fred’s first book, Folk Tales of the North Country was a collection of legends and folk tales, many of them told by his father and other acquaintances, but all embodying something of the spirit of the land that was the mainspring of his inspiration. This was followed by further collections of folk tales from the West Midlands and Lancashire, but his first novel for children came in 1960 with the publication of Aidan and the Strollers, a story based on the life of strolling players in the early nineteenth century. Later that year The Bonny Pit Laddie was published. The most popular of all his books, it is the one closest to his heart in that it is set in his native colliery village, incorporating much of the personal history of his own family, especially his mother and uncles, and drawing heavily on the vicissitudes of the mining community of Durham (shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction in 1960).
He wrote prolifically for children during the sixties and early seventies, taking inspiration from the North Country (The Courage of Andy Robson), historical themes such as the Civil War (The Luckless Apple), the lives of the navvies who built the British railways in the mid-nineteenth century (Young Tom Sawbones), and his own adventures during World War II in North Africa (The Moving Finger). Of his children’s books he said, ‘I do not write with children in the forefront of my mind. Rather I write about children, and the adult world as seen through the eyes of children’ (Commire 1974, 97). Fred received The Other Award from the Children’s Rights Workshop in 1977 in recognition of the body of his work and its social content.
After his retirement in 1972 Fred continued to give public lectures and to write poetry, but he increasingly turned his attention to the nineteenth-century diarist, the Revd Francis Kilvert. With the support of the Kilvert Society he spent the last ten years of his life writing articles and undertaking the research for his final book, Francis Kilvert and his World. Fred died suddenly, shortly after the publication of this significant contribution to Kilvert studies, but with every intention of turning his own journal manuscripts, covering much of his adult life, into a book (perhaps for publication) not unlike Kilvert’s famous diary of country life.
Although he made his name as a children’s author and biographer, there were many other sides to Fred. He was a keen walker and lover of the countryside. In later years the bracing, empty moorland of his youth was replaced by the gently undulating Worcestershire lanes. He was frequently to be seen tramping around the lanes of Wichenford and Broadheath, and he never lost his childlike love of paddling in brooks, catching minnows and flying kites – much to the delight of his grandchildren. He was a great raconteur with an impish sense of fun, a lover of football (he was a lifelong supporter of Newcastle United), the theatre and the arts. In addition to his children’s books and biography of Francis Kilvert, there remains a substantial body of unpublished poetry, as well as his journals.
How War’s Nomads came to be written and conserved
The book, which the editors have entitled War’s Nomads following Fred’s use of these words in ‘Erk in the Desert’, is based on three documents. Two of them are handwritten notebooks taken from Fred’s journal series of more than 30 volumes: the first is called ‘On Draft’ by Fred, and the second the ‘Black Book’ by us. ‘On Draft’, recorded in an exercise book, deals with Fred’s posting to the Middle East, the journey by troopship to Cape Town, South Africa, and his experiences of a military camp in its vicinity. The ‘Black Book’ is a small notebook, less than A5 in size, with a black cover, and was bought by Fred in Cape Town on 25 June 1942.
The ‘Black Book’ begins with a description of the area round the Suez Canal, where Fred disembarked in late July 1942, and Cairo. It then provides a detailed account of desert warfare, written as events unfold, running through until mid-December 1942, when the book ends. The text is, understandably, more hurried than ‘On Draft’, and much of the content is in note-form plus a few pen-and-ink sketches. The third document is ‘Erk in the Desert’, a considered memoir written by Fred while in East Africa, and completed in first draft in the autumn of 1943. This is based on the contents of the ‘Black Book’ from September to December 1942, but extended by Fred’s recollections to cover the period January to March 1943.
Fred’s 1943–44 journal, an additional source written in East Africa, contains some retrospective information about western Libya from which he draws, and he is able to supplement this when writing his memoir by using library resources in Nairobi. Fortunately, the material in the memoir for January to March 1943, though not covered by the ‘Black Boo
k’, is also backed up by materials in an Air Ministry publication dated 1950, but dealing with the war in Tunisia in early 1943, in which Unit 606 played a small but noteworthy part (Air Ministry 1950).
It was originally Fred’s intention, in retirement, so his journal tells us, to produce a text dealing with his wartime experiences. Accordingly, Gillian and I have combined ‘On Draft’ and ‘Erk in the Desert’ to form a single volume in two parts. The ‘Black Book’ has been used in two ways: to conclude the journey from Britain to South Africa recounted in ‘On Draft’ and to carry it through to Cairo; and, additionally, to provide immediate eye-witness accounts of military events by introducing small sections of it into the text of ‘Erk’, using a smaller size of typeface for the inserted material.
Fred’s own use of the ‘Black Book’ material in his memoir ‘Erk in the Desert’ is skilful, but, in his zeal to conceal military secrets and to play down the violence he is witnessing and the danger he is in, he sometimes obscures or even omits what it is now important to reveal – for example, when and where his unit went operational, and the military circumstances under which they functioned. These are precisely the materials that the less inhibited ‘Black Book’ sets forth in an unvarnished manner, and that render the ‘Black Book’ eminently quotable. Unfortunately, we don’t know whether or how Fred intended to explain the precise role of Unit 606, but I have attempted to provide an answer to this key question in the last section of this introduction.
The ‘Black Book’, written literally in the heat of battle, supplied a vital clue in our research into the activities of Air Ministry Experimental Station (AMES) Unit 606, to which Fred belonged. It specifically mentions Squadron Leader Young as the RAF officer who led Fred’s unit westwards across Egypt and away from El Alamein in November 1942. It was only by speculatively googling Young’s name in conjunction with the RAF in North Africa that we discovered that M. H. Young had been the Squadron Leader of 213 Squadron (Gumbridge 1968). From that single lead we were able to access 213’s Operations Record Book (ORB),2 only to discover that 213 Squadron’s Hurricanes, though highly active at El Alamein, were of little use in bombing and strafing after the break-out – hence the detachment of Sqn Ldr Young from his unit and his deployment on the ground with AMES 606 and 607.
Even more relevant than 213 was 260 Squadron and its ORB,3 which gives much detail that has been cited in the footnotes. 260, with its sister squadrons 112, 250, and 450 in 243 Wing, followed the same pattern of movement (at similar dates) to the advanced landing grounds as Fred’s radar unit (Table 2) (Jefford 2001). It will be seen that AMES 606 and 260 Squadron (both associated with 211 Group) were closely linked, not only during the Egyptian and Libyan campaigns, but especially so during the attack on Tunisia. Table 2 brings land and air together in ways that the memoir, for reasons of secrecy, does not. Squadron Leader Young gave up leading AMES 606 on the ground after El Adem in late November 1942, at which point he said a final goodbye to 213 Squadron.4 260 Squadron remained at Maturba (also written Martuba) in Cyrenaica until mid-December, when it overtook 606 at Marble Arch on 18 December.
The editors were keen to discover whether an Operations Record Book (ORB) existed for AMES Unit 606 in The National Archives at Kew, but searches revealed no such document or any reference to it. Either it was never kept, or if it was, it was destroyed or lost during the war. However, we were able to access and copy ORBs for two of the other small Type 6 radar units that were operating in North Africa at the same time as 606 – namely, AMES 6085 and 6106. They not only showed us what ORBs for Type 6 radar units looked like, but gave invaluable insights into the activities of the units and their methods of operation. However, these entries were essentially mundane and perfunctory in a military manner, and they give no flavour of the life of individuals posted to the units.
The ORBs for AMES 608 (12 pages) and 610 (4 pages) provide information about the operation of the equipment, and the unreliability of the Crossley lorries in which it was transported. Even if an ORB for 606 had existed, it is unlikely it would have added very much to Fred’s record of events, other than in terms of radar procedures and dates of arrival at, and departure from, landing grounds – though all these pieces of information would have been helpful. So, with some certainty, we can claim that ‘Erk in the Desert’ is, in all probability, the only definitive account of a Type 6 radar unit’s operations and of its men’s lives over several months in the last phase of the Western Desert War.
TABLE 2: AMES 606, Squadrons 260 and 213, and the Landing Grounds, 1942–1943
Neither Gillian (Fred’s daughter), nor Colin (his son-in-law) – the editors of this book – knew of the existence of ‘On Draft, the ‘Black Book’ or ‘Erk in the Desert’ before Fred’s death in 1983, when his widow, Gwen, gave us all his papers (journals and other documents). Fred had, from time to time, talked about life in the desert, telling us about the gharry in which the unit travelled, and explaining that this was one of the best and healthiest times in his life; but he made no specific reference to Unit 606, its military objectives or the equipment they used.
It was a complete surprise to us, in the early 2000s, to find the three key documents (and later the photographs, some collected together, but others scattered through his later journals), out of which this book has been constructed. The only member of Fred’s unit of whom we had heard was Sid Rapperport, whose name cropped up from time when the desert was mentioned in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1979 Fred told us about Sid’s plan to visit him in Worcester, but we have no record of the visit.
‘On Draft’ had a handwritten label ‘Invaluable – not to be lost’ attached to the cover of the exercise book in which it was written; and the handwriting of the text is minute and in black ink and pencil. Because of the movement of the boat, the parts written at sea were particularly hard to transcribe, and the passages written during storms were at times almost impossible to decipher. Frequently both editors had recourse to a magnifying glass. The ‘Black Book’ was also kept in a small hand and in black ink; some parts were comparatively easy to read, but the battlefield sections required constant consultation between the two of us prior to transcription. Fortunately, much of it could be checked against the typescript of ‘Erk’.
There are, in Fred’s papers, two versions of his memoir, ‘Erk in the Desert’. The first, attributed to Flt Lt F. Grice, had been accurately typed on thin typewriting paper, though a new title page had been added in handwriting plus his new address – Training College, Henwick Road, Worcester. The rank F/Lt had been crossed out, and the final page was missing. We think that this document may have been professionally typed – possibly in East Africa – from Fred’s version, finished, according to him, in Kenya on 23 October 1943. On that date he wrote:
By an extraordinary coincidence, I have finished the last chapter of my book today, the anniversary of the great Alamein barrage! Of course it is not finished. Now to re-write and re-type – a long job. But the back of the work is broken. I can more easily revise than rebuild the whole book.
The second version of ‘Erk in the Desert’, also with a handwritten title page – and very similar in all respects to the first – is called ‘Western Desert Diary’ by Mr F. Grice, and the college address (with Henwick Grove instead of Henwick Road) is given accurately, but no date is provided. It may have been typed by Fred. It post-dates and corrects the first version, though it is typed on plain, torn-out sheets removed from an exercise book. Marked ‘Badly typed copy’ it turned out to be carefully corrected in ink and complete. The editors found this the more reliable typescript, because it contains occasional typed expansions of the first version, and corrections in Fred’s own hand. Crucially, it includes the missing final page, and is the version used in this publication – only rarely did the editors resort to a few words peculiar to the first account, though they have opted for its name, ‘Erk in the Desert’, as the title for the second part of the book.
Background to ‘On Draft’
World War II had been in progress for almost two years when Fred was called up from the A J Dawson Grammar School in Wingate, Co. Durham. His English post was not reserved (that is exempt from national service), but at the age of 31 he seemed rather old for active duty, even in the RAF, which he entered on 7 July 1941. The need to supply new and specially-trained units for the drawn-out Western Desert War in North Africa probably explains his posting, as his service record shows, as an Aircraftsman Second Class (AC2) to Number 18 Reserve Command of the RAF Recruits Centre on 12 July for 2 months of basic training at Padgate, Lancashire.
Fred was sent to the Number 2 Radio School at Yatesbury, Wiltshire on 19 September, and after a month passed his examination as a Radio Operator. A week later, on 26 October, he was posted for training to the Air Ministry Experimental Station (AMES) 77N at Scarlett Point, Castletown on the Isle of Man, and on the last day of December 1941 he passed out as an AC2 Radio Operator. Fred must have continued working in radar on the Isle of Man, because there is a photograph of him in uniform taken at Ballasalla, near Castletown, in March 1942 (Plate 1), though family records also show that he was in Poling, Sussex, that same month, where there was a radar station – part of the fixed chain facing the French coast.
PLATE 1 Fred at Ballasalla, Isle of Man, while on radar training, March 1942
PLATE 2 Fred prior to embarkation, 24 April 1942
On 11 April Fred was sent to Number 30 Maintenance Unit, but he was at home in late April, when another photograph of him was taken, presumably on pre-embarkation leave (Plate 2). He was promoted AC1 on 5 May, and after delays embarked on 7 May for the Middle East, which he reached via West and South Africa (with further hold-ups), disembarking at the Suez Canal on 26 July. After a month in Egypt, mostly in the vicinity of Cairo, on 31 August he was posted to his unit AMES 606.