Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  ‘Why is he standing there? Surely he should be here,’ she would say as she came up behind me, making as if to lift me along. Needless to say, I didn’t move.

  One of the most unlikely matches of the time was an excursion I made with Edna O’Brien to Cuba after the missile crisis. I arrived in Havana before Edna but not before the film of her novel Girl with Green Eyes was showing in the cinema opposite my downtown hotel. Photographically, it was not a good omen. I failed to get any interesting pictures at the prison where Castro and his revolutionaries had once been held, now a technological university, and I felt decidedly uncomfortable with the surveillance I was given by two North Vietnamese diplomats who seemed fixated by my United States Army battle jacket. I found the long tannoyed public addresses given by President Castro as tiresome as all the queuing up for meals. Dinner on the lawn of the British Embassy in honour of the celebrated Irish novelist, with the sea as a backdrop and men in white coats continually providing drinks, was much more my style. Had I come too far from Finsbury Park?

  I had a birthday in Cuba which Edna marked with the presentation of a sombre poem, ‘First the Lion, Then Vultures’. Edna, who is a very kind and considerate person, was never put off by the difficulties in Cuba. Maybe she saw parallels to her own Irish people’s struggle against the English. Anyway, she came away from Cuba with a deep love for the place and its spirit. I came away just loving Edna.

  14. JERUSALEM

  The period of phoney war before the onset of six days of vicious fighting between the Arabs and the Israelis in June 1967 proved an unusually languid time for me. Under the misguided impression that Egypt would be a key listening-post for rumours of war, the Sunday Times had sent me to Cairo. My partner there was Phillip Knightley, one of the many Australians to attach themselves to the paper and enlarge its fun factor. As day succeeded day, and the Egyptian High Command resolutely kept us away from any zone that might be remotely warlike, we established a routine stroll from Semiramis Hotel down to the Gezira Sporting Club, where Phillip spent time improving his backhand on the tennis court while I swam. Lunch and dinner were long, leisurely affairs by the poolside.

  It was one of those gilded but all too infrequent periods in journalism where there is nothing to be done apart from spending the proprietor’s money in the most relaxing and dignified manner possible. Not that we made no effort at all. In an attempt to outflank the military machine one day we took a taxi to Sinai, where we had heard there was a considerable arms build-up. Arriving in the Canal Zone, the taxi driver made an unscheduled stop at the office of the field security police, at which we were greeted with warmth by a colonel who appeared to be Peter Ustinov’s double.

  ‘Welcome to Suez, English gentlemen,’ he beamed at us before steering us straight back to Cairo.

  After a fortnight in Cairo Phillip decided the war rhetoric would blow over. This was an opinion shared by the British Foreign Office and by Frank Giles, the foreign editor of the Sunday Times. We were both recalled from the Cairo duty. The very next morning Israeli Mystère and Mirage jets struck the Egyptian airfields in the Western Desert. The war had begun.

  The Cairo experience had been negative but not futile. When it came to the business of launching correspondents and photographers off to the war, everyone was directed to the Israeli side where there was at least a possibility of access. Had I stayed in Egypt I would have missed the war in photographic terms altogether. As it was, after one night’s sleep at home, I found myself at Heathrow again with a tribe of other newsmen en route for Cyprus, the nearest jumping off point for the conflict.

  The next move was not obvious. Some correspondents rushed to sign up fishing boats which generally proved to be a mistake. One of their number was to spend the war marooned in Lebanon. Eventually he cabled home, ‘Am I in doghouse query’, and received the reply, ‘Return kennelwards soonest’. Those of us who hung on at the airport were rewarded with the news that the Israelis were planning to send in an aeroplane to take off journalists.

  Undoubtedly the Israelis felt they had more to gain from press attention. All the chest-beating by the Arabs about 100 million co-religionists being ready to smite an isolated Israel had had an effect. At that stage the Israelis were considered very much the underdogs in the conflict.

  The Israeli plane that flew us into Tel Aviv that night was a De Havilland Rapide of elderly vintage. When we sorted ourselves out at the Dan Hotel it appeared that there were four Sunday Times survivors in the first wave—myself and another photographer, Neil Libbert, and two writers I had not worked with before. Murray Sayle, another Aussie, had a talent for being first. Colin Simpson was a stealthier character altogether, best known for his cunning in exposing bent antique dealers and insurance fraudsters. He was not a regular war correspondent, though he had nothing he needed to prove in this area. He had seen action as a regular army officer during the Malay emergency.

  Our immediate problem was deciding how to divide up the war effort. We had no crystal ball, much less orders on how to go about it. Though we were all agreed that we were not going to wait on the services of a conducting officer, Murray seemed determined to go to Sinai, where a tank battle was raging. I had no intention of being deflected from the one place that I was sure would yield the greatest war pictures—Jerusalem. Neil Libbert teamed up with Murray to go south, while Colin and I headed for the Holy City in a hire car.

  Driving towards Jerusalem in the early morning was oddly peaceful. So peaceful, in fact, that we thought we might have missed the war altogether. A BBC news report on the car radio indicated that the old city had been taken. We drove carefully towards the Jaffa Gate along the Bethlehem Road only to find it firmly in the hands of the Arab Legion. Colin backed the car at high speed, narrowly avoiding an unexploded mortar bomb in our path. Unknowingly, we had got ahead of the Israeli troops.

  We noticed that beside the road through the valley there was a deep communications trench that led from the Israeli forward positions up into the gardens of the Dormition Monastery on Mount Zion. Through our glasses we could make out Israeli troops entering what looked like a tunnel. We decided to risk the valley road again, abandon our car near the monastery, and take our chance with the Israeli soldiers.

  Within minutes we were explaining to the forward company commander that if he was set upon making Jewish history, it was only fit and proper that the Sunday Times should be with him to record it. We were accepted right away, and moved off with them through the olive groves.

  The assault battalion we joined was called the 1st Jerusalem Regiment. We were with the point platoon, moving in single-file and bent double behind the scanty cover. There was no time to crawl. The Israelis behind us kept up a constant fire, directed at the walls of the old city. At first the only opposition came from isolated bursts of automatic fire—usually the reassuring crack of bullets well over our heads but occasionally the chilling, sucking ‘whup’ of one too close. Our objective was the Dung Gate, though we paused briefly on the way to check out a tented camp recently abandoned by the Arab Legion, their gear still neatly folded on their beds.

  Eventually Colin decided to hitch a lift on a friendly tank while I stayed with the point section that would be first through the gate. Colin raised a laugh among the soldiers as he moved off when an officer said that I was the brave one, getting so close to the front of the assault.

  ‘Him? He’s a Scotsman called McCullin, and just too mean to buy a telephoto lens, that’s all.’

  This was certainly a period when I felt that I had a charmed life, that danger could not touch me.

  It was Colin who took the first fall. As we were going for the gate, his tank fired its gun and so surprised Colin that he tumbled off into a clump of prickly pear. I was too absorbed to be aware of this at the time. Colin and I were not to meet up again until the battle for the city was over.

  We came through the Dung Gate at a rush. I was on a high, swiftly tempe
red by the need to concentrate in order to stay alive.

  We took a lot of casualties in that first hundred yards inside the gate, coming under heavy sniper fire, bullets ricocheting in all directions as we fanned out. I found myself in a section lined with low walls, only two or three feet high, but cover of a sort, and there I got one of my better-known pictures of Israeli soldiers firing over these walls. So exposed were we that if the Arabs had used mortars we would not have stood a chance.

  As the Israelis increased their fire we edged forward into an area of little stone houses in very narrow streets, some barely more than a yard wide and obvious death traps. We took the widest we could find. Suddenly a Jordanian soldier ran out in front of us with his hands up. He did not appear to be armed, but everyone was jittery because of the snipers, and we all hit the ground. The Jordanian was blown to bits. The officer told them to cease firing, and soon after another young Jordanian and an old man came out of a house to be taken prisoner. The unit was moving further down the street when the lead man was shot dead, and a few yards later the next man received a bullet through his chest. A doctor came up to me and started screaming for a knife to cut away the man’s clothing, though I failed to understand the torrent of Hebrew until someone said ‘knife’ in English and I fumbled for mine while the man died. Then the soldier just behind me was shot by a sniper behind a wall. He was stretchered off with a handkerchief over his face.

  The weight and speed of the Israeli attack were beginning to tell. More people started to surrender, among them a large number of men in pyjama suits. Jordanian soldiers wore them instead of uniform, hoping to be mistaken for civilians. The Israelis were laughing and making fun of them, but I saw no Israeli soldier mistreat anyone. They all seemed to venerate the city, and there was no looting or desecration. On more than one occasion I watched Israelis hold their fire when sniped at from the roofs of religious buildings of any persuasion.

  Outside the city walls a tank battle could be heard raging. The Jordanians had taken their tanks to high ground and were pouring shells into the city as Israeli armour moved forward to engage them. It was soon all over.

  I slumped down, immobile after all the hectic action. I had no thought of what to do now.

  ‘Why are you sitting there?’ an Israeli soldier called to me. ‘History is being made, my friend. You must go to the Wailing Wall.’

  ‘What’s the Wailing Wall?’ I asked.

  I found the Wall through a series of back alleys that today are cleared, leaving the wall exposed on an open plateau. In this warren of medieval streets Jordanian snipers had exacted a heavy price from incoming Israelis, who now stood with their faces screwed up before the Wall against which they appeared to be banging their heads. I took a picture of those soldiers paying homage.

  ‘We’ve waited a thousand years for this,’ one man said to me as soldiers were hugging and kissing each other around me, lifting each other off the ground while snipers’ bullets ricocheted off the Wall itself.

  I spent time in the Dome of the Rock, where Mohammed was said to have risen into heaven. Now it was being used as a casualty station and a holding area for prisoners. I took more pictures of the victors jesting over the vanquished.

  That evening I went back to the Wailing Wall, where Israeli soldiers were standing around listening to news of their victory on radios borrowed from Jordanian cars whose number plates were prized as souvenirs. Between newscasts the Israelis sang patriotic songs until they were told to pipe down because they were making life easy for the few remaining snipers. I saw two Israelis killed by their own men. They were running to the Wall in the dark and were shot by nervous sentries.

  As the night wore on it grew very cold. While the battle lasted we had been infernos, stoked with adrenalin; now we were drained and lifeless. I checked into the King David Hotel, scene of the 1946 atrocity when an Irgun bomb had killed ninety, mostly British military personnel. I was told I could choose from any of several hundred empty rooms. I was too tired to take a bath before falling into bed. I slept like a dead man, and awoke next morning to see the sheets covered with red dust. I remember thinking guiltily that I would be in trouble for that, and then made the mistake of asking for ham and eggs for breakfast!

  Unless I did something really flagrant, like asking for ham at breakfast or expressing ignorance of the Wailing Wall, people seemed naturally to assume that I was Jewish. On the other hand, in Israel you realise that there is no such thing as a typically Jewish look. Several of the soldiers with whom I entered the city had blue eyes and fair hair.

  I had time for one social occasion—morning coffee with Cornell Capa, brother of the legendary photographer Robert Capa, who was killed in Indo-China while covering the war for Life magazine. Then, as I had already decided that I wanted to get my pictures back as fast as possible, I hitched a lift back to Tel Aviv, where I found Colin Simpson in the Dan Hotel, knee-deep in maps of Jerusalem. It turned out that he had managed to climb back on his tank and had entered the city through the St Stephen’s Gate. He thought that I might have been shot in the first assault and was relieved to see me. He had spent part of his day in Jerusalem looking for my remains, even peering under the shrouds of the Dome of the Rock.

  I had been worried about censorship at the airport but in the event just walked through. I was going so soon that they didn’t realise I was a newspaperman. They thought I was just another scared visitor baling out.

  ‘Why are you leaving?’ the man at the passport control asked me. ‘There is so much to see. We are victorious.’

  The whole airport was in an exuberant state. We now know, of course, that the great victories of that war in Jerusalem, on the West Bank, in Sinai and on the Golan Heights would provide the seeds of anguish in later years, but there was no hint of this at the time. All was rejoicing.

  15. ANOTHER DESERT WAR

  I first encountered Viscount Montgomery of Alamein in Egypt shortly before the Six Day War, and I’d had a bit of a desert war with him myself. We were thrown together by a Sunday Times stunt designed to steer him back into the limelight so that he could redirect all his old desert battles of the Second World War in print. The problem arose when I was asked to take a picture of him. Monty had backed off with a pained look on his face. He got into a lengthy discussion with the Sunday Times top brass escorting him and word came down the chain of command that my appearance was in some way not fitting for taking photographs of the Field Marshal. It seemed that the length of my side-burns was the chief cause of offence.

  I put in a special request to return home. In no way was I going to cut my hair to suit an old martinet, however legendary. I stuck to my guns and ended up snapping away, side-burns intact. He liked people who stood up to him.

  I had gone on the trip expecting something of a holiday. It was my first visit since I had been to Egypt on national service, and instead of employment as a twenty-seven-shillings-a-week skivvy I was going back as part of an international VIP junket. I was to be back-up to the official photographer, Ian Yeomans. Also in the party for the twenty-fifth Alamein anniversary were the magazine’s art editor, Michael Rand, and the Sunday Times editor-in-chief, Denis Hamilton, a quiet and formal but nice man who had been a junior officer on Monty’s wartime staff. It was he who had unloaded a succession of Monty’s memoirs on the readership in serial form with tremendous success. For us, therefore, Monty had a double aura—not only was he a revered national hero, he was also good for circulation.

  I saw a different Egypt. We stayed initially at the luxurious old Mena House hotel by the Pyramids, to which I was inclined to give better marks than on my first sighting twelve years earlier. In my room, courtesy of the management, were a transistor radio, a bottle of eau de cologne, and a huge chocolate cake with ‘Welcome to the United Arab Republic’ piped on the top. In the morning, I discovered that there was an Egyptian paratrooper standing on guard duty outside each of our bedrooms. Even President
Nasser seemed to regard Monty as an honoured guest, and most of the top Egyptian brass paid court to him at one time or another.

  We moved on to Alexandria, to a riot of red carpets and bands, in a marvellous old piece of Hungarian rolling stock. We were enjoying an almost royal procession, though there was one rather awkward situation when a reporter and photographer on the Daily Express tried to penetrate the enterprise. It was Fleet Street at its most wily, attempting to get a slice of the action—not unreasonably perhaps, for Monty was considered national property. I could see myself in their place and felt sorry for them, but it was a Times Newspapers deal and that was that. The Egyptian authorities saw them off, protesting loudly.

  This stately progress continued until we reached El Alamein. One morning a Russian helicopter descended from the sky and out on the dunes emerged a man in full dinner jacket balancing a tray of cold drinks for the party. Mike Rand almost choked. All laughter had to be stifled because of the presence of his military highness. Nobody could be seen to be ridiculing the main event.

  I had begun to think it was going to be nothing but suppressed mirth all the way when suddenly the number one photographer, Ian Yeomans, took sick. That was the moment when my side-burns came under the scrutiny of the eye of history, and I found myself peering through the viewfinder at this wiry little man with the amazing translucent blue eyes that gazed back at you from a skull-like head.

  Monty, of course, was the entertainment. For much of the time he went around with General Sir Oliver Leese, whose main passion was digging up cacti in the desert for transshipment back to England. Leese was a giant of a man with a dreadful war wound which came on exhibition when he tried to negotiate his bathing trunks. He was also a very charming man, which is more than could be said for Monty. ‘Come on, Oliver,’ Monty would say. ‘Let’s have a talk away from these dreadful press people.’ When it was arranged for Monty to pay a visit to Nasser, we all gathered to give him a good send-off. His parting words were, ‘Now I’m going to see General Nasser and you press people are not allowed.’ He was a great one for pulling rank, and liked to rub it in, did Monty. I learned only later the story about Winston Churchill saying to the King, ‘Sometimes I think Monty’s after my job,’ to which the King replied, ‘What a relief. I thought he was after mine.’