Eastern Approaches

by Fitzroy MacLean

  After asking at a number of Beduin tents, we were directed to the wadi where Melot was lying up. He was cheerful, but tired and extremely hungry, for Rommel’s advance to Alamein had interfered with his supplies. I cooked him some rather stodgy bully beef rissoles fried in oatmeal, which he ate avidly. At last I had found someone who appreciated my cooking.

  Then we got out our maps and discussed the forthcoming operation. It appeared that there had been a number of rather suspicious enemy troop movements in the neighbourhood during the past week or ten days. In particular, various outposts on the edge of the Gebel had been strengthened. It looked rather as though we were expected. I remembered what I had been told in Alexandria before we started.

  We decided to make further investigations. First of all we had a talk to two of the local Sheikhs, dignified old gentlemen with grey beards, who were friends of Melot’s. We squatted on the ground on a hilltop, brewed up some tea, and talked inconclusively in a mixture of Arabic and Italian. The gist of their information was that the enemy seemed to be uneasy about something.

  In view of this further confirmation of our suspicions, Melot suggested that he should send one of his Arabs, a deserter from the Italian army who was a native of Benghazi, to the town itself to see what he could pick up. That afternoon we took the Arab as far as the edge of the escarpment and started him off on his twenty miles’ walk to Benghazi, with instructions to spend the next day there and come back to us the following night. He set off down the escarpment, grumbling as he went. We shouted after him to buy us some cigarettes and matches in Benghazi. He looked, I thought, singularly unreliable.

  Melot and I settled down to wait for him in a nearby wadi. The rest of the party were camping five or six miles back. I cooked some more rissoles.

  All next day we lay low and waited, lying in the scrub. Melot told me about the First World War, in which he had taken part as a pilot in the Belgian Air Force and about his life in the Gebel.

  That night we sat up waiting for our spy. There was no sign of him. Then, after breakfast, just as we were beginning to give up hope, he limped in complaining that his feet hurt him and looking more unreliable than ever. But he had brought us some cigarettes, decorated with a large Fascist badge on the box and some little Italian wax matches — cerini. I had not seen any since before the war. We gave him something to eat and started to question him; Melot in Arabic and I in Italian.

  He had a lot to tell us. He had stayed the night with relatives. He had also been round the bazaar. The bazaar, he said, was full of the news of our impending attack, which had upset local opinion quite considerably. The civilian population was being temporarily evacuated; a strong German machine-gun detachment had arrived as well as Italian infantry reinforcements, minefields had been laid at different points round the city perimeter, including the place where we hoped to force our way in. Finally, the actual date of our attack — September 14th — was being freely mentioned.

  In fact his report was far from reassuring.

  Taking our Arab with us, we made our way back to the wadi where the rest of the party had camped. When we got there, we found that David and the main force had just arrived. They had been delayed by a number of breakdowns on the way, and in order to make up time had travelled day and night. They did not think they had been spotted from the air. A jeep had been blown up by thermos bombs crossing the Trigh-el-Abd and the occupants killed. One was an elderly lieutenant in the R.N.R., who had been harbour master at Benghazi during the British occupation of the town the year before and was coming to show us round when we reached the harbour. It seemed hard that he should have been killed in this way at such an early stage in the proceedings.

  We told David our news, and after some discussion he decided to send a signal to G.H.Q. asking whether they wished to make any change in the original plan in view of the extensive publicity which it seemed to have received. Clearly, now that we had got so far, there could be no question of coming away again without making our raid, but a change of time-table might help to put the enemy off his guard.

  The answer came back in a few hours: we were to disregard bazaar gossip and carry out the operation according to the original time-table.

  Evidently there was nothing in the rumours we had picked up. It looked as though Melot’s Arab had simply been trying to make our flesh creep, and put us off an operation in which he had no wish to take part. We continued our preparations, feeling reassured.

  Our plan was simple. The main body, relying on the element of surprise, so essential in operations of this kind, would make its way down the escarpment at nightfall, cross the intervening plain, rush the road block and drive at full speed down to the harbour, where various targets had been allotted to different parties. After that we would see how things went.

  A problem was caused by the existence of an Italian wireless post in a small fort on the edge of the escarpment, so situated that we were bound to pass close to it on our way down. It was decided that a party should set out, slightly in advance of the main expedition, for the purpose of silencing the occupants before they could give the alarm.

  In order to lower the morale of the enemy, and also to make them keep their heads down until the last possible moment, the R.A.F. had been asked to bomb the town and harbour as hard as they could for the two hours preceding our arrival, which was timed for half an hour before midnight.

  By the early afternoon of September 13th, our preparations were complete. The guns, which even their close-fitting quilted covers could not entirely protect against the all-pervading sand, had been cleaned once again. The explosives, under Bill Cumper’s care, were ready. The doctor, we noticed, was busy preparing bandages, splints and blood plasma against our return. Each of us was issued with our ‘escape set’ in case we got left behind or captured; a map of the Western Desert printed on fine silk, to be hidden in the lining of our battle-dress; a small compass masquerading as a button; some benzedrine tablets; a collapsible water-bottle; and various other ingenious devices to be distributed about one’s person.

  The party that was to attack the fort started first. Bob Melot insisted on leading it. With him went Chris Bailey, a new recruit to the S.A.S. whom we all liked and who, before the war, had run a hotel in Cyprus.

  Then our own turn came. The branches and camouflage nets were stripped from the vehicles and the covers taken off the guns; we ate rather hurriedly a bar of chocolate and a tin of sardines; the convoy assembled, and we jolted off in the failing light, following a winding valley down towards the plain.

  For the first hour or two the country was familiar. We were following the route that Melot and I had taken to the edge of the escarpment. The maps were inaccurate and we found our way through a maze of wadis largely by the help of landmarks; a burnt-out German truck; a Mohammedan shrine; the unusual outline of a hilltop.

  Clearly it was going to be no easy matter for a convoy the size of ours to negotiate the precipitous escarpment, especially as our choice of routes was limited by the latest enemy troop dispositions. Melot’s Arab, who claimed to know a good way down, was brought up to the front of the column and used as a guide.

  He turned out to be a very poor one. It was now quite dark. The track soon became increasingly precipitous and showed signs of petering out altogether. It was strewn, too, with immense boulders which grated ominously on the sumps of the trucks. After a good deal of whispered barracking from me in Italian, our guide finally agreed that we must be in the wrong wadi. The process of extracting the column from it, and searching for a new way down was long and painful.

  Meanwhile the R.A.F. had been bombing Benghazi for some time. We could see the bombs bursting. By the time we reached the foot of the escarpment and started out across the coastal plain, the bombardment had stopped. The searchlights flicked round the sky once or twice more and then went out. The moon was down. We should not now reach Benghazi until well after the appointed hour. We seemed to have been on the way a long time. It was cold and the effects o
f the rum we had drunk before starting had long since worn off. We cursed the Arab roundly.

  At last we reached the tarmac road and a few minutes later were nearing the outskirts of the town. It would not be long now before things began to happen. So far there had been no sign of the enemy.

  We were almost on top of the road block before we saw it. This time there was no red light and no sentry. Only a bar across the road. Beyond it, in the shadows, something was flapping in the wind. The leading vehicles stopped and word was passed back for the rest of the column to halt, while we investigated matters further. On either side of the road there was wire and in places the soil seemed to have been dug up. This looked unpleasantly like the minefield we had heard about. If so, it meant that our only line of approach lay along the road and through the road blocks. David summoned Bill Cumper, as the expert on mines, and invited him to give his opinion of this somewhat disquieting discovery.

  Bill made one of his inevitable jokes and then we watched him while he went forward and poked about in the darkness. Evidently our suspicions were well founded, for after a quick look round, he turned his attention to the road block. He fiddled with the catch for a second or so, and then the bar flew up, leaving the way open for us to advance.

  The situation, Bill felt, called for a facetious remark, and, as usual, he rose to the occasion. ‘Let battle commence,’ he said in his best Stanley Holloway manner, stepping politely aside to let the leading jeep through.

  The words were hardly out of his mouth when pandemonium broke loose. From the other side of the road block a dozen machine-guns opened up at us at point-blank range; then a couple of 20-mm. Bredas joined in, and then some heavy mortars, while sniper’s bullets pinged viciously through the trees on either side of the road.

  From the front of the column we opened up with everything we had. The leading jeep, driven by Sergeant Almonds of the Coldstream Guards, drove straight at the enemy with all its guns firing and was already well past the road block when an incendiary bullet hit it in the petrol tank and set it ablaze. Another followed and met the same fate. The Bredas in particular, gave our opponents a considerable advantage, while the blazing jeeps furnished a light to aim by. Then, after a time the combined fire of our leading vehicles, now dispersed on both sides of the road, began to tell and there was a marked falling off in the violence of the enemy’s opposition.

  But it was abundantly clear that we had been expected and it could only be a question of time before fresh reinforcements were brought up. There was no longer any hope of rushing the defences. The element of surprise had gone, and with it all chance of success. Meanwhile time was passing. Hopelessly outnumbered as we were, we could not afford to be caught in the open in daylight. Reluctantly, David gave the order to withdraw. Still returning the enemy’s fire while they could, our vehicles dispersed on the open ground on either side of the road and headed singly and in groups for the Gebel, in a race to reach cover before the sun rose.

  First light caught us just short of the foot of the escarpment. Looking back we saw a most unwelcome sight. From Regima, Benina, and the other airfields round Benghazi, aircraft were rising like angry wasps.

  We barely had time to run our trucks into the scanty cover afforded by the rocky ravines, with which the face of the escarpment was scarred, before the first aircraft were upon us, bombing and machine-gunning. There were about a dozen of them in the air at a time. They flew round in a circle, one after another peeling off and swooping down to drop its bombs or fire a long burst from its guns. Now and then one would fly off back to its airfield to collect a fresh supply of ammunition and another would take its place.

  But they seemed uncertain of our exact position, and a good deal of their bombing and machine-gunning was going wide of the target. From where we lay we could see a little party of Arabs making their way across the plain, taking their produce to the bazaar; first two greybeards on donkeys and then some women following on foot. At last the Italians had a target they could see. Once again they swooped and dipped; there was a burst from their guns, and the Arabs were left crumpled and struggling on the ground.

  Then a lucky shot found the truck containing the bulk of our explosives and ammunition, and set it alight. A column of smoke rose from it, followed by a series of flashes and explosions. Seeing that they were at last on to something, the enemy started methodically to comb the neighbouring wadis. Another truck full of explosives went up, taking with it all my personal kit. That was another two trucks gone. My equipment was now reduced to an automatic pistol, a prismatic compass and one plated teaspoon. From now onwards I should be travelling light.

  The day wore on, but the enthusiasm of our tormentors showed no signs of waning. Sometimes they would fly off, bombing and strafing empty wadis, and we would hope that our troubles were at an end. Then suddenly they would come circling back, flying low over our heads, and we would dive for cover again. Meanwhile there was nothing that we could do. To open up at them would have drawn their fire and betrayed the exact position of our remaining vehicles. For the same reason any attempt to move would have been disastrous. There was nothing for it but to lie low and hope for the best.

  From where we were, half way up the escarpment, we looked across the plain to the white walls of Benghazi, with beyond them the blue waters of the Mediterranean. But we gave little thought to what in happier circumstances would have been a delightful view. To us it seemed inevitable that the enemy, having pinned us down from the air, would now send out a mechanized force to mop us up. We scanned the wide expanse of plain anxiously and heaved a sigh of relief as each successive scurry of sand in the distance resolved itself into a harmless dust devil, and not, as we feared, into the forerunner of a squadron of armoured cars.

  The morning passed slowly. A speckled chameleon, hardly noticeable against the stones, crawled out of a hole and looked at us, a miniature gargoyle. Someone put it on his bandana handkerchief. It put its tongue out and turned a rich shade of red.

  Soon after midday the circling aircraft flew off one after the other and we were left in peace. As we sucked at our tepid water-bottles, we imagined our tormentors giving a colourful account of their exploits over iced drinks in a cool mess. After a brief respite they reappeared, and, working in relays, kept it up until sunset. Meanwhile, to our great relief, there was still no sign of enemy land forces.

  As night fell and the last aircraft flew off, we set to taking stock of our position.

  It left much to be desired.

  Chapter VI

  Long Trail

  WE were separated from our base by 800 miles of waterless desert, dotted with enemy outposts and patrols, now all on the look out for us. We had lost several of our trucks, some of our food and a good deal of our ammunition. The enemy knew, within a few hundred yards, where we were. Twenty miles away in Benghazi there was an enemy garrison, presumably at that very moment preparing a sortie against us. We had already had a taste of what the Luftwaffe and the Regia Aeronautica could do, and might expect that the experience would be repeated at frequent intervals all the way back to Kufra.

  After dark we were joined by the little party that had attacked the fort. They had succeeded in their task. They had stormed and taken the fort, killing or capturing the bewildered Italians who manned it. But the cost had been heavy. Bob Melot had been badly wounded about the legs and body by a hand-grenade; Chris Bailey had been shot through the lung; one of the N.C.O.s, Corporal Laird, had had his arm shattered. All were in considerable pain. The first thing was to get the wounded back to the doctor. We made them as comfortable as we could in the backs of our trucks and set out up the escarpment.

  It was a nasty drive. Our way led across precipitous country. If we went fast the pain caused to the wounded by the jolting became unbearable. If we went slow we were in danger of being caught by the daylight in the open at the mercy of enemy planes. When I was not driving I sat with Chris, who was lying on a bedding roll perched up on the top of the petrol cans and para
phernalia with which the truck was filled. Though every jolt and lurch of the truck hurt him, he was as cheerful and gay as ever.

  We reached the wadi where we had left the doctor just before dawn. He was there and took charge of the wounded. Everything seemed much the same as when we had left it thirty-six hours earlier. We divided ourselves up between the different wadis, camouflaged the trucks, driving them into patches of scrub or up against rocks and pulling camouflage nets over them. Guardsman Duncan arrived as though by magic with mugs of strong sweet thick tea, which he could always be counted upon to produce under any circumstances. Then, as dawn was breaking, we lay down to get some sleep while we could.

  The first part of the day passed quietly enough. In the intervals of inspecting our camouflage and discussing our future movements, I interrogated the Italian prisoners who had been captured in the fort. Like everyone else in the neighbourhood, they seemed to have had warning of our impending arrival, but failed to connect it with themselves in their own cosy little fort, so that in the event it had come as a very severe shock to them. Now that they had had time to sum up the position, they were frankly terrified, for they had no doubt in their minds whatever that, when they had been interrogated, they would be killed. To them it seemed inconceivable that anyone in our position would burden themselves with useless mouths or alternatively release prisoners who could betray their position. And so they drew touching pictures of aged parents and chubby children awaiting them at home and begged us to be merciful. No sooner had I reassured them on this point, than their attention was once again distracted, this time by the activities of their own side.