Reflections on Libya
We crossed the eastern boundary of Libya on 12 November 1942 and entered Tunisia on 23 February 1943. Little more than three months spent in any country is not an excellent qualification for generalizing about it, but it was long enough for us to form firm opinions.
This part of the North African littoral was once a fertile land. The Greeks colonized Cyrenaica and the Romans, Tripolitania (Fig. 5). Cyrenaica, under Greek control, supported five towns, and Tripolitania three fine cities, Sabratha, Oea (Tripoli) and Leptis Magna (Homs)(Fig. 9). However centuries of Berber and Arab neglect wasted the land, and let the sand come in from the desert almost to the sea’s edge. When the Italians took Libya over from the Turks in 1912, it must have appeared to the first colonists a grim and unprofitable land.
However unprepossessing it was, the Italians meant to occupy it and to use it, and many years were spent in quelling the refractory Senussi and building up an adequate garrison organization. It seems, however, that it was only with the advent of fascism that colonization began in earnest. Libya therefore had for us the interest of being one of the world’s youngest colonies, one of the most recent examples of what an industrial European nation could and could not achieve in modern colonization. It was a working model of the impact of Europe’s newest political system upon a backward land and a backward people.
The Italians accomplished much. They built a continuous metalled road from border to border – not the magnificent highway it was boasted to be (although we saw it when the traffic of three years of war had passed over it and repairs had been cut to a minimum) – but in comparison, for instance, with East African roads,6 a creditable achievement. Along this road, they built commodious rest houses about fifty or sixty kilometres apart. They extended other good roads with good hotels south into the desert. The Libyan railways were poor, and covered little of the colony: but the Libyan towns were fairly well built. Benghasi, Derna, Tobruk and Bardia (Figs. 6 and 7) were the equivalent of the Greek Cyrenaican ports; Homs and Misurata took the place of Leptis Magna (Fig. 9); and Tripoli was converted from a rather squalid oriental settlement into a well-designed modern town with twentieth-century architecture and twentieth-century amenities.
Most important of all, the Italians reclaimed wasted acres of the world’s land. In an earnest attempt to revive the fertility of Libya, they planted eucalyptus and wattle to fix the drifting sand, and sank thousands of wells. The water that lay in hidden reservoirs below the Sahara sand was not always drinkable, but it made plants grow. Where a generation before there was nothing but camel thorn, Italian colonists grew olives, vines, cereals and oranges.
Upon this reclaimed land, the Italian government planned to settle about twenty thousand colonists every year. They gave the colonists every incentive to migrate. Before their arrival, the land was tractor-ploughed, and the limits of each farm were drawn. A farmhouse was built and equipped with furniture, outhouses and a water cistern. The fact that these houses were of a standard type, did not prevent them from being attractive and adequate homes. When the colonists arrived, they found a ready-made farm awaiting nothing but their labour. Each settlement had cost the government £1,500, two-thirds of which the settler was expected to refund within twenty years.
I do not know whether they found any difficulty in repaying the loan; but apparently the settlers were on the whole contented. They had been chosen for their poverty, industry, large families and sound political views. Life was hard enough, but living was cheap. It was lonely, but the zone centre was there to provide a little amusement and communal pleasure. Castel Benito, for instance, had shops, a theatre-cum-cinema, and a good little school. I was able to see at first hand how well-fitted and equipped the school was. There were flush lavatories, white hand-basins, new wall maps, good infant school apparatus, good text books, well printed, designed and coloured. Of course everything had a strong fascist bias. Even the children’s exercise books had their covers plastered with photographs of the Duce, of naval reviews, bombers over Spain, and elementary lessons in flying; and there was too much of the Bimbi, amate Benito Mussolini. But these did not detract from the technical excellence of the equipment.
On the whole the colonists were contented and hardworking, and each pioneer looked forward to a day when he could hand over to his son a freehold farm in a flourishing condition. The Italians not only added to the wealth of the world by putting back into cultivation land that Africa had lost, they also beautified the reclaimed land. Some of the more ambitious estates were admirably laid out, and the very disposition of houses and orchards gave the wilderness a grace it had not possessed for seventeen centuries. The builders of the newer zone centres were pioneers in architecture; compared with villages like Battisti and Olivetti (Fig. 7), the smaller towns of Kenya, for example, are badly planned and inadequate. In addition, although they may have had ulterior motives in this, they reclaimed from oblivion less tangible wealths – the buried architectural wealth of Greece and Rome. Though Sabratha and Leptis Magna may have been excavated (Fig. 9), partly to attract tourists, partly to remind the peaceable Italian peasants from home of the power and dominance of the old Caesars, the excavations and reconstructions were nevertheless done with great skill and reverence for past beauty. No one can scorn labour in such causes.
The Italians accomplished much in a short time; but their achievements were costly, and perhaps the biggest price they had to pay was the forfeiting of the allegiance of the Arabs. The conquest of Libya began in massacre and bloodshed, and colonization continued on a basis of cruel disregard of the right of the native. The slogan of the colonial administration was – ‘For the white settlers, the fertile land; for the Arabs, the desert.’ Always mistrusted, the Italians inspired in the Arab a resentment he did not easily forget. The Libyan native is, on the whole, a treacherous man, and the conventional greeting with which he met the British advancing troops – ‘Inglesi quoiz – Italiano mushquoiz’, had no doubt been reversed every time he found himself on a different side of the battlefield. But even discounting this hypocrisy we know that the settlers at villages like Tarhuna (Fig. 9) found themselves faced in defeat, not with looting Tommies but insurgent Arabs.
In his treatment of the Libyan native, it seems that the Italian failed, and his failure is probably an indication of what would have followed upon the acquisition of colonies by fascist Germany. But when the fate of Libya is finally settled, Italy’s achievements must not be forgotten. If her ill-fated but courageous attempt to make the desert blossom again is allowed to lapse, and the wilderness to creep again over a colonized land, the world will be poorer in a commodity it cannot afford to lose – fertile and habitable land.
Notes
1 The aerial for the radar was located on the roof of the gharry (see Plate 4).
2 Troops met at Alam el Osmaili.
3 Presumably the collected works of Shakespeare and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.
4 This, plus Fred Grice, was the core crew that took part in the whole trip from El Alamein to Tunisia.
5 The French flag.
6 The first draft of ‘Erk in the Desert’ was written at RAF Eastleigh in Kenya, East Africa in 1943.
CHAPTER 8
Tunisian Finale
Into Tunisia
At first Tunisia was indistinguishable from Libya. The roads were as bad, the countryside as dreary. We drove on with the same apathy, until we came to the Seven Sweepers’ Bridge (Fig. 9), scene of a recent heroic action. Not long before, a patrol had crossed the marshes there to find itself cut off from its supplies by a sudden rain. However, although under constant fire from artillery and aircraft, the Eighth Army Engineers, with wood requisitioned from as far back as Tripoli, bridged the marsh with this primitive causeway and relieved their comrades. And someone with taste had chosen for it a name as poetical and musical as the action was heroic.
At Ben Gardane more than the language of the streets and signposts reminded us that we were now in French
territory. The settlements in Tripolitania were predominantly Italian but here it seemed that the Arabs had been more welcome in French towns. Medenine (Fig. 9), to which we eventually came, seemed to carry a far higher proportion of native houses than an Italian village like Sabratha.
Medenine was not a beautiful town. Its core was of European houses, originally white and ornamented with wrought balconies and windows, but now wrecked by bombardment. The bulk of it, however, was primitive native architecture. The commonest building was an agglomeration of small barrel-vaulted houses, stuck together like loaves in a big bakery, desert-coloured, dark and with narrow doors. The native Kasr or stronghold was an extraordinary structure of scores of such hovels, glued together until they looked like a big man-made honeycomb; and each room was about the size of a coke oven. Beyond the town the land went levelly away to the north to a flat coast line, and to the Isle of Djerba (Fig. 9), legendary island of the Lotos Eaters; but before it rose the Mareth Hills, a 2000 feet high barrier of unfamiliar mountain. These were the hills that the French had fortified in days when young fascists went about clamouring for Nice, Tunis and Corsica; and there Rommel was waiting.
We camped on a site above and to the south of the town, in full view of the hills, and fortunately near a big gravity tank which controlled Medenine’s water supply. Water to us was as an orchard to a boy. By day we climbed to the top of the tank, drew gallons and gallons of liquid gold, and lowered it to the ground with cable. Even after we had been warned off, we climbed the tank in the dark, and kept our containers full to capacity.
In spite of the water our stay at Medenine was not comfortable. Having entrenched themselves, the enemy began to hit back. We were raided continuously for days by fighter bombers, withdrew again and again from long range artillery fire, and finally settled down to endure as best we could. The climax to the excitement came on Saturday 6 March. We were awakened early in the morning by the noise of an artillery duel. By breakfast the news was through that the German tanks were coming out of the hills to attack, and we were ordered to get out of the way of the battle. That was an extraordinary day. After a perilous journey through the shelled town, we pulled up about eleven miles behind the battlefield, and waited. To know there was a battle raging, to hear the duellings, to see the outfliers of the battle coming over our heads, the formations of Junkers 88s and Focke Wolfs, and the counter-attacking Kitties and Spitfires,1 all on their way to bomb and strafe someone else – to be almost a spectator at the struggle, within gunshot yet able to sit on the sand and talk with the reservists by their guns, this was a remarkable experience. I talked the afternoon away with a young New Zealander, a reserve anti-tank gunner who was waiting to see his first action. He had not been so long from home that his heart was still with his farm and his sheep. As he talked about the home he had just left, I hoped that he would not be needed that day.
He was not needed. Towards four o’clock the battle died down. The best of the Axis tanks had been superbly held by our anti-tank gunners. Before evening, Rommel, who had told his men that morning that if they did not smash the Eighth Army with this attack, their days in Africa were numbered, accepted defeat, and retired to the hills. He had excused his long retreat by pleading shortage of petrol. But even with his new supplies he was a beaten general.
I cannot leave Medenine without mentioning a heroic padre whom I never saw. Shortly after the occupation of the town, he commandeered a house, turned one of the rooms into a reading and writing room, and equipped another with a billiard table he acquired from somewhere. This house was the Desert Rats’ Club, but more than the Seventh Armoured Division (the true Desert Rats) were allowed to use it. There we could buy stamps, a few NAAFI goods and even chai and sandwiches. The club was little more than ten miles from the enemy lines, and came under bombardment day after day; but as far as I know there was always chai there – for those who dared go for it. All honour to the unknown padre who so coolly kept this club open while the town day after day was an open target for that dreadful artillery.
Beyond Mareth
Undeterred by the abortive German assault on 6 March, the Eighth Army continued to prepare for its next offensive. While the bulk of the British forces were to make a frontal assault on the hill positions, the New Zealanders were briefed to proceed south, penetrate the Mareth Hills and outflank the enemy; and we were ordered to accompany them. Exactly one week after the ‘bloody nose’ battle, we packed and drove southwards toward Foum Tataouine (Fig. 9). At the end of the first day we halted and pitched camp about one mile north of the town.
We were fortunate in our site here, for we pulled off the road onto a soft-soiled plain, behind which rose the first Mareth range. Here we had moved away from the enemy and were out of reach of their artillery. The land was fairer and less devastated than around Medenine, and there was still a civil population in the town.
No sooner had we pitched camp than we were invaded by a crowd of Arabs selling eggs, bread and vegetables – but not for money. Money had ceased to be a currency from the time we had moved out of range of Alexandria. In Tripolitania the wealthiest were those who had stocks not of cash, but tea; in Tunisia the desideratum was tobacco. The Tunisian Arabs were so hungry for tobacco that they would buy eagerly at three times the price charged by the NAAFI. Any man who had cigarettes to sell could make 200 per cent profit on each packet. There must be many ways of making a fortune in this world, but I commend to any enterprising and ambitious would-be millionaire the sale of tea in Libya and tobacco in Tunisia. Certainly ours was a brisk market. The natives swarmed around the back of the gharry, and clambered up the tailboard, waving their bank notes, thrusting eggs, loaves, carrots, photographs and leather purses upon us, crying in chorus, ‘Sigara, Sigara!’ They had to be pushed forcibly away, and did not disperse until we strode among them shouting, ‘Le marché est fini – absolument fini!’
We stayed long enough on this site to replenish our store of eggs (which we carried packed in a wooden box full of sand), and to climb to the French-built casemate2 above the town. This was one of the strongholds which formed part of the Mareth defences, but it had been abandoned by Rommel, who preferred to keep his artillery mobile. It was a romantic eyrie, a twentieth century bandit’s lair. A steep road curled around a conical hill 1500 feet high, until it stopped at the gateway of a dun-coloured fort, built so cunningly on the bare rock that it seemed to grow out of it. In the body of the fort were rooms for a small garrison, an open cistern for collecting water, guardrooms, and a cylindrical look-out; and from the blockhouse a vertical iron ladder led down a narrow pit by three or four dark flights to a network of underground caverns and galleries, like a little coal mine. In these galleries there were more cisterns, store rooms, stables, ammunition dumps and cupboards; and each gallery ended in a machine-gun nest, heavily concreted, fitted with thick steel floors and provided with ammunition chutes. With these nests commanding all the roads and approaches, the fort might have held out for months in the days when war was less fluid and swift. It could be held by an invisible force; the gunners could fire, retire and be relieved by rested troops without once exposing themselves, and only the most accurate and heavy bombardment could have broken the strength of the casemate. But the Germans had chosen not to occupy it. In desert warfare artillery must be more mobile than the French had imagined. Romantic and lonely, it looked out over the gullied ranges where Rommel was making his most desperate stand.
The day after the visit to the fort, we moved further south as if making for Borj le Boeuf (Fig. 9); but before reaching it, we were assembled and given orders to file singly through the hills in a north-westerly direction, towards Jebel Nefusa. This was one of the most mysterious of our journeys. Every so often a single gharry was dispatched over the sand and through the pass, with instructions not to exceed ten miles an hour. The tell-tale dust trails were to be kept down to a minimum. At this wearying speed we drove for hours and hours, slowing to a snail’s pace whenever a wind blew up a dust trail
that might have given away our position and direction to high-flying recce planes. Hour after hour we bumped along over the plain, then up and through the rocky pass, until towards evening we came to our objective. Beyond the pass were the New Zealand forces, already arrived and settled in, and so excellently dispersed and camouflaged that to estimate their strength must have been a puzzle, and to hope to destroy them by bombing, a despair. They were leaguering, scattered over the broad valleys like a herd, the epitome of discretion, discipline and strength.
As if realizing the futility of attempting to harm this force, no enemy bombers came; and on the evening of 19 March, the army began to assemble to go into battle. This was a memorable sight. As the afternoon faded, the scattered forces began to congregate. First came the tanks, filing over the crests of the hills, and lining up in long columns as if for a race. They came in a great concourse, with their noses down, breaking the camel thorn beneath them, over the ridges and down the winding tracks. Then the Bren-gun carriers, the supply gharries, the 25-pounders, the ammo trucks that had drawn together on the distant hill slopes where they looked like herds of strange animals, began to move in and take up their place behind the tanks. Before six every waggon was in place; and exactly at six a thousand engines were started and the whole formidable convoy began to move. They drove past us like a review, Shermans and Crusaders with their commanders in earphones and the familiar black berets, Bofors carriers and heavy ack-ack, two-tonner, six-tonner, six-pounder and twenty-five-pounder, and last of all the ambulances. And as if not to be outdone, the western sky behind the hills staged its own pageantry. A falling sun kindled the tumbled clouds till they burnt fire red and there was splendour over the purpled landscape.
War's Nomads: A Mobile Radar Unit in Pursuit of Rommel during the Western Desert Campaign, 1942-3 Page 20