Eastern Approaches

by Fitzroy MacLean

  One good thing about all this was that, when we had done our six jumps and could wear our wings, we felt delighted with ourselves, as if we had really done something. The more so as we were the first Allied parachute unit in the Middle East and there was therefore no competition. Few of us, I think, enjoyed jumping, at any rate not after the first jump; but it was agreeable to think about afterwards.

  Indeed, looking back, I am not sure that Peter Warr’s dramatic approach was not perhaps as good as any. At any rate it lent excitement to what might have otherwise been a dreary and unpleasant routine. He himself soon got tired of teaching and joined a parachute battalion, with which he greatly distinguished himself three years later at Arnhem.

  Now that I had done my jumps my training was completed. I was due to go on the next operation. I had pictured it as an attack on a desert aerodrome. But, as things turned out, it was on different lines.

  Chapter III

  Outward Bound

  IN the spring of 1942 Benghazi was a place of considerable importance.

  Despite the demolitions carried out before our withdrawal the previous autumn, the enemy had soon put the harbour back into commission, and it was now serving as the principal supply port for Field-Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps, who were standing opposite Eighth Army in the neighbourhood of Gazala, two or three hundred miles further east. At the same time, enemy aircraft based on the complex of airfields situated in the Benghazi area, Regima, Benina and Berka, were affording the enemy valuable support and decimating our convoys on their way through the Mediterranean to Malta.

  Something had to be done to stop this.

  Night after night the bomber pilots from the R.A.F. station across the road dropped ton upon ton of high explosive on the docks and aerodromes of Benghazi. Once Peter Warr managed to smuggle himself on board a Wellington as rear gunner and came back with a highly coloured story of bombs whistling down and flak streaming up.

  But air bombardment was only one way of dealing with the problem, and not necessarily the most effective. The S.A.S. had already made a number of extremely successful attacks on the aerodromes round Benghazi. G.H.Q. were now toying with the idea of a raid on the docks and installations in the town itself.

  The plan was that, as a first step, a small party should enter the town surreptitiously and make a stealthy tour of the harbour. If they found suitable targets — shipping in particular — they were to attack them. They were in any case to spy out the land for an eventual large-scale operation.

  David had said that I could go on the first operation after my training was completed. This was it.

  For an operation of this kind it was necessary to wait for a moonless period. The next one was in the second half of May. This gave us plenty of time to make our preparations.

  The first question to decide was how to get into Benghazi. There was clearly no advantage to be gained by parachuting. For a time we considered the possibility of landing from the sea. But in the end we fell back as usual on the good offices of the L.R.D.G. They would escort us to within reach of Benghazi, after which we would go on into the town by ourselves, taking with us a supply of explosives and some kind of light boat to use in the harbour. We would travel in the ‘battle-waggon’.

  This was a new, cut-down Ford station waggon, with room in it for six people and a certain amount of kit. It was well sprung and had a powerful engine, and the removal of the roof and sides had considerably increased its speed. It was fitted with mountings for two machine guns in front and two behind. The guns themselves could be removed at will and placed out of sight on the floor, thereby giving it a more innocent appearance. For our present purpose we had it painted dark grey to resemble a German staff car with the enemy air-recognition mark, a broad white stripe across the bonnet.

  The question of the boat was left to me. We wanted something that would fold into a small space and was easily portable. First, I borrowed a selection of R.A.F. rubber-dinghies from a thoroughly mystified administrative officer at the R.A.F. station next door. But these were oddly shaped and hard to manage in the water. They were also for the most part orange or lemon-yellow in colour, being designed so as to be visible from as far away as possible; which was not what we wanted. They were inflated, too, by means of a small cylinder of compressed air, which, when we tried to use it, went off with a noise like the last trump, setting all the dogs barking for miles round.

  Then I remembered an article of army equipment known as a Boat, reconnaissance, (Royal Engineers), and with the help of Bill Cumper procured two of them. They were small and black and handy and you inflated them by means of a small pair of bellows, which emitted a wheezing sound. Each held two men with their equipment.

  The party for the operation was made up of three officers, David Stirling, Gordon Alston and myself, and three N.C.O.s, Corporal Rose, Corporal Cooper and Corporal Seekings. Gordon Alston, a recent arrival, knew Benghazi well, having spent some time there while it was under British occupation the year before. He would act as guide. The three Corporals had been with the S.A.S. since it was first raised and had taken part in most of David’s operations.

  We now started on an intensive course of boating. Every night, after dark, we carried our little black boats down to the Great Salt Bitter Lake, inflated them, and paddled about, while one of the party played sentry and shouted out as soon as he heard or saw us. This was generally very soon. The bellows made a noise; our paddles made a noise; the smooth luminous surface of the lake made a background against which we showed up all too clearly. But we consoled ourselves with the thought that, on the night, there would be no moon and the sentries in Benghazi would not be expecting us.

  We were also encouraged by the success of our dress rehearsal. One night after dinner we all piled into the battle-waggon, with our rubber boats in the back, and motored over to Suez. Despite the enemy recognition mark on the car and the fact that none of us were wearing proper uniform, the guard at the entrance to the docks made no difficulty about admitting us. Once inside, we drove down to the water’s edge, unpacked the boats and started to inflate them.

  A gunner from a nearby Anti-Aircraft site strolled across and stood watching us. ‘What are you blokes on?’ he inquired in a friendly way. ‘Never you —ing mind,’ we replied offensively. ‘You — off’. ‘All right; all right,’ he said in an aggrieved tone ‘I didn’t mean no harm,’ and walked sadly away. Would a German, we wondered, have been as easy to get rid of?

  As soon as he was out of sight, we embarked: David and Corporal Cooper in one boat, and Seekings and myself in the other. The rest of the party stayed by the car. Taking a bearing on a convenient light, we paddled off in the direction of two tankers that we had seen from the quayside. It was further than we thought; a long row in choppy water; and hard to keep direction amid the many flickering lights of a big port. But we got there in the end. When we were within a dozen yards of our tanker, Seekings and I shipped our paddles and let our little boat drift up against her side. Then, holding ourselves in position by the tanker’s hawser, we fixed a couple of ‘limpets’ to her stern. These were half-spheres of metal, made to contain a pound or so of high explosive and fitted with a magnetic device to hold them to the side of the ship. They could be detonated by a time-pencil and were guaranteed to blow a sizable hole in a hull of ordinary thickness. This time we used empty ones.

  For a moment, we hung listening to snatches of the crew’s conversation which floated through the lighted porthole. Then we let go and paddled back again. On the jetty we found David and Corporal Cooper who had been equally successful; we deflated the boats, packed them into the car and drove out of the harbour area and out of Suez without further incident. It was too easy.

  Next morning we rang up the Port Authorities and asked them to return our limpets. They were not amused.

  The next few days were taken up with drawing stores, with tommy-gun and pistol practice, and with other last-minute preparations. It was not easy to stave off the well-meaning c
uriosity of our friends, most of whom had guessed that something was afoot, though none except those of us who were actually taking part in the operation knew our destination.

  Meanwhile the S.A.S. had gained a new recruit: Randolph Churchill, who had left a Staff job in Cairo to join us. Randolph had too good a nose for news not to find out in a very short time that we were going on an operation. And, as soon as he had discovered this, he wanted to come too.

  David objected that he had not done his training and that in any case there was only room for six in the car. But Randolph continued to plead, and in the end a compromise was reached. Randolph would come as an observer on the first part of the trip, but would stay behind with the L.R.D.G. patrol who accompanied us, while we went into Benghazi. Randolph grudgingly accepted this arrangement, but it was clear from the start that he would not be happy until he got his own way.

  Eventually the appointed day arrived and we set out for Alexandria where we were to receive a final briefing from the Intelligence Authorities.

  Alexandria looked inviting in the early morning sunshine: white houses glistening in the sun round the wide sweep of the blue bay. At the Naval Intelligence Office at Raz-el-Tin everything was ready for us; maps, air-photographs, the latest intelligence reports, and, finally, a large wooden model of Benghazi, with its Cathedral, its government buildings, its docks, streets and houses all accurately constructed to scale. In a little white-washed inner room, barred to all save the initiated, we settled down to impress its features on our memories, working out on the model our best way into the city and the best route down to the docks.

  At the base of one of the jetties in the harbour was what seemed to be a narrow strip of shingle. On the model it was marked by a tiny dab of yellow paint, between the grey of the jetty and the green of the harbour. This, if we could reach it, would be a good place to launch our boats. But first we would have to get through a barbed-wire entanglement and past the sentries who were known to patrol the docks.

  Always assuming that we managed to get into the town. This would largely depend on the sort of check which the enemy kept on the main roads leading into Benghazi. Anxiously we asked what we might expect in the way of check posts or road blocks. The latest photographs and reports were studied, and we were told that if we approached it by the Benina road, it should be possible to get into the city without being challenged. There had been a check post, but it seemed to have been abolished. We heaved a sigh of relief. In any case an isolated night-watchman or sentry should be easy enough to deal with.

  Before we left we arranged to be kept supplied by wireless with any fresh information that might come in. We also arranged with the R.A.F. to leave Benghazi alone the night we were there, but to give it a good bombing the night before we went in. This, we hoped, would help to cause confusion and lower the powers of resistance of any members of the garrison that we might encounter during our visit.

  Then, after an excellent luncheon, we piled into the battle-waggon and started off westwards along the coastal road. As we were leaving the outskirts of Alexandria, I noticed a sign-post put up before the war by the Royal Egyptian Automobile Club. ‘BENGHAZI’, it said hopefully, ‘KM.1000’.

  We spent the night at Mersa Matruh, a cluster of white buildings and green palm trees nestling among the sand dunes on the edge of the Mediterranean.

  It was from Matruh that my father had set out in 1916 across the desert, first to reconnoitre and later to capture Siwa Oasis. At that time the Senussi Arabs, whose stronghold Siwa was, had risen against the Italians, then our allies, and, with the help of Turkish and German officers landed by submarine, were causing us great embarrassment and tying up in Egypt considerable forces which could otherwise have been diverted elsewhere. Against them we employed Light Car Patrols, the first units to use motor vehicles for long-range work in the desert. Armed with machine guns and equipped with T. model Fords they finally captured Siwa in 1917.

  After the fall of Siwa the Senussi gave us no more trouble on the Egyptian side of the frontier, though, in spite of the most brutal repression, they kept up for twenty years a spasmodic resistance to the Italians across the border in Libya. Now, with the Italians fighting against us, the Senussi, throughout the desert, both in Egypt and Libya, had become our allies, and Siwa was the Headquarters of the L.R.D.G. and the jumping-off place for our raids. Sometimes L.R.D.G. patrols, far out in the desert, came on the tracks made in the gravel by their predecessors, the Light Car Patrols, and found rusty bully-beef tins marking their camp sites.

  Next day we too set out for Siwa, branching inland and travelling in a south-westerly direction across the desert by what was now a well-marked track. On the following morning, after a night in the open, we came in sight of the oasis; first an escarpment of red and yellow sandstone and then, lying in a trough, surrounded by salt marshes and palm groves, Siwa itself.

  Ever since I was a child I had been brought up on stories of Siwa. In the years before 1914 a cousin of mine had been one of the relatively few Europeans to enter the oasis, and he and my father had played their part in the operations which led to its capture. Now, it did not fall short of my expectations. Under the palm trees were pools of clear fresh water bubbling up from a great depth. Round one of them was an ancient stone parapet. I remembered my father telling me what a joy it was to plunge into these pools after long weeks in the desert, and now, at an interval of a quarter of a century, I followed his example. The water was deliciously refreshing and gushed up with such force that it was like bathing in soda water.

  In the middle of the oasis rose what was left of the fortress-town of the Senussi, built of mud and shaped like a beehive. The shells of 1917 had torn great breaches in its walls, revealing inside it the columns of the ancient Greek temple of Jupiter Ammon, whose oracle was famous in the time of Herodotus. Nearby, among the palm groves, were some older ruins, dating back to the ancient Egyptians. In the market place the Arabs clustered round us, friendly and curious, and soon I found myself being entertained to tea and mutton by several of the leading citizens. As in Central Asia, the food was placed in a large central dish, from which we all helped ourselves with our fingers. An elaborate pipe was also passed round for each of us to take a pull at in turn as we squatted on the ground. Meanwhile the L.R.D.G. Medical Officer, who had accompanied me on this expedition, was fascinated by the disease from which my immediate neighbour was suffering. ‘Very interesting,’ he kept saying, ‘and no doubt highly contagious.’

  The L.R.D.G. had their mess in some modern buildings built by the Egyptian Government, and there they made us welcome. The unit was made up of a number of patrols recruited from volunteers from different regiments or formations. There was a Guards Patrol, a New Zealand Patrol, a Rhodesian Patrol and so on. We were to be escorted on our present venture by the Guards Patrol, and we were now taken charge of by Robin Gurdon, who commanded it.

  We could not have had a better host. Robin had come to the L.R.D.G. after a long spell in the desert with the Coldstream Guards. Though no longer, by our standards at any rate, so very young, he had spent all his war as a junior regimental officer and most of it fighting. He performed the arduous duties which he had chosen superlatively well and obstinately refused the many Staff appointments which would have been open to him. He was to be killed on his next patrol, continuing to direct operations to the end after he had been mortally wounded. Now, a tall elegant figure with a heavy fair moustache, his face burnt black by the sun, he made us welcome in the two-roomed, doorless and windowless mud hut in which he lived, as hospitably as though it had been a country house at home: showing us where to spread our bedding rolls, arranging for us to be called with tea and shaving water, and arranging for trucks to take us down to bathe.

  At the Headquarters Mess we met the Commanding Officer, Colonel Prendergast, and Bill Shaw, the Intelligence Officer. Both had known the Western Desert well before the war, when they had spent their leave exploring it on their own account in company with Colonel
R. A. Bagnold. Now that the desert, from being a geographical curiosity, had become an area of first-rate strategical importance, their knowledge was of inestimable value. Fortunately General Wavell, with characteristic insight, had been quick to grasp this and in 1940 had entrusted Bagnold and his companions with the task of raising the L.R.D.G.

  The more I saw of the L.R.D.G., the more impressed I was. There seemed to be nothing they did not know about the desert. In the two years since the unit had first been formed, their patrols had covered immense areas of country which the two conflicting armies, as they fought their way up and down the narrow coastal strip in the north, had left completely untouched. With the help of the sun-compass and the theodolite they had perfected the art of desert navigation and could bring you unerringly to a given hillock or heap of stones hundreds of miles away in the middle of a vast expanse of featureless sand and gravel. They had mapped and charted great stretches of unknown desert and could tell you with unfailing accuracy what to expect in the way of going, where you could hope to get through with a light truck and where with a three-tonner, where to look for cover and how to find the occasional well, half choked up with sand, upon which your survival might easily depend. They had worked out to the last ounce and the last gallon the amount of food, water and petrol needed to take so many men and so many vehicles so far. They had made dumps of food and petrol in safe places which patrols could fall back on if necessary and which meant that they could stay away from their base far longer than would otherwise have been possible. Finally they had a first-class system of wireless-communications which enabled the patrols to keep in constant touch with Headquarters and flash back immediately the vital information which they collected from hundreds of miles behind the enemy lines.