Soon after it got light, the air sentries, from their look-outs on the hilltops, had signalled the first enemy ‘recce’ plane searching for us. Now others followed. But evidently our camouflage was too good for them. We lay quiet behind our respective bushes and stones and felt a little more optimistic about the future. If the enemy failed to discover us before dark, we should have the whole of the following night in which to increase the distance which separated us from him and would thus gain a valuable start. We were careful not to move or to do anything else which might betray our position.
It was then that we saw the jeep. It was one of ours and it was driving towards us from a neighbouring wadi at a good brisk pace. As it came it sent up a column of dust. I never discovered who was driving it or what had induced him to set out on his early morning round of visits.
We were not the only people who saw it. For some time an enemy plane had been circling overhead looking for us in a desultory manner. On the appearance of the jeep it came lower in order to investigate. The jeep continued its headlong progress in our direction, the dust billowing out behind it. The plane circled and then turned and flew off in the direction of Benghazi.
Could it be that it had not seen us after all? I was sharing the cover afforded by a good large boulder with a Royal Australian Air Force pilot who had come with us to arrange for air-supplies, should we need them. Cautiously we put our heads out from behind it. As we did so, the earth all round was kicked up by a burst from the plane’s tail-gunner. Hurriedly we dived back. ‘This,’ said the Australian, ‘is going to be a shaky do.’
He was right.
The enemy had not wasted the intervening night. The neighbouring airfields had been heavily reinforced — at the expense, we learned later, of his troops in the front line at Alamein. Before long the pilot who had discovered us came back accompanied by a swarm of fighters and bombers, which settled down to circle monotonously over our wadi, diving down, heedless of the small-arms fire coming up at them, to discharge bombs and cannon into what was left of our transport, and into anything they could see moving. Lying on that bare hillside under a blazing sun, I have seldom felt more disagreeably exposed.
This time there was no pause for lunch and a midday siesta, or if there was, the pilots were working in shifts and we did not notice it. My watch had stopped, and the sun seemed to move incredibly slowly across the sky. There were always twenty or thirty aircraft in the air over our heads. As the day wore on, first one truck and then another was hit and caught fire.
Watching the plane circling overhead and wondering where the next bomb or the burst from their cannon would strike, any distraction was welcome and I found myself calculating the minimum number of trucks required to get us home. As truck after truck disintegrated before our eyes, it became clear that it would be a tight fit. And then there was the water and the petrol, can after can of which was being spilt out into the sand. ‘Shaky do’, it seemed to me, summed up the position very neatly.
Eventually, with sickening deliberation, the sun went down; the last aircraft cleared its guns and flew off home to supper; and we turned once again to computing our losses and our assets. Considering the strength and the duration of the air attack, comparatively few of us had been killed or wounded. But we were short of transport, short of food, short of water and our only remaining wireless set had been blown up.
Several trucks were still blazing and by their light we inspected the others. Some of those which had been hit seemed capable of repair. In the end we came to the conclusion that if we jettisoned everything except the barest necessities and if every jeep and truck was loaded to its maximum capacity, there would be just enough transport for everyone.
The situation as far as food, water and petrol were concerned was less promising. Food and water were shortest. If we ate and drank barely enough to keep us alive, with luck there should be enough to last us the 400 miles to Jalo, which, if all had gone well, we should find in the hands of the Sudan Defence Force. If all had not gone well, we should have to think again when we reached Jalo. Sufficient, we felt, unto the day. …
Our calculations were interrupted by a sudden torrent of excited Italian. Following up the noise, I found our three prisoners in tears with spades in their hands. A perplexed Sergeant was standing over them with a tommy-gun. Seeing no reason why they should not be usefully employed, he had decided to make them dig graves for our men who had been killed. But the Italians, on being handed spades and seeing that he was carrying a tommy-gun, jumped to the conclusion that, in true Fascist style, they were being made to dig their own graves. Once again they took a great deal of reassuring.
Before we moved off there was a hard question to be decided; what we were to do with the wounded. A long and necessarily arduous journey, under a blinding sun, in open trucks, over rough country lay before us. We were likely to run into all kinds of trouble before we reached our destination. Already the wounded had spent one whole day under constant air attack. Were we justified in exposing them to further danger and exhaustion? In the end the doctor decided to risk it in the case of Bob Melot and Corporal Laird. Chris Bailey and some of the other wounded he decided were too ill to move any further; even the journey of the night before had tried them severely. We accordingly made them as comfortable as we could where they were and left behind a medical orderly and one of the Italian prisoners with instructions to drive into Benghazi next day under a Red Cross flag and ask them to send out an ambulance for them. It was a hard decision and we left them reluctantly.
It was a long time before we received news of them, though we knew from our own rearguard, who had stayed behind to watch, that the Italians had come to fetch them. Then, many months later, we heard that they had died in hospital in Benghazi.
Now, in the light of the burning trucks, we divided ourselves up into two main parties, and a third smaller party under David Stirling, who was going to try to collect various stragglers who had not yet been accounted for, and catch us up later.
Then, having filled our water-bottles and destroyed everything worth taking out of the derelict trucks, we piled into our vehicles and started off into the darkness. My own jeep had a crew of eight, all fortunately travelling as light as I was myself. We drove as best we could by starlight, for it was rough going and we were still too near the enemy to show a light. There was some confusion at first. ‘Les camions français par ici!’ shouted the French. Then we got going.
We did not make much progress that night. The going was bad; there was no moon. Clearly our best course would be to move only as far as the southern edge of the Gebel and take advantage of the comparatively good cover to lie up there for another whole day, in the hope of throwing the enemy off the scent, before we set out on our long trek across the open desert. Just before dawn we halted in what seemed a likely wadi, camouflaged the trucks and then settled ourselves into the scrub and rocks near them to await developments.
The transition from darkness to light is a rapid one in the desert. Soon the sun was beating down on us fiercely. With it the flies returned to the attack. Time passed slowly.
Before starting the night before, we had worked out a scale of rations designed to eke out our meagre supplies as far as Jalo. This allowed each of us about a cup of water and a tablespoonful of bully beef a day. To simplify matters, we decided to eat our rations in the evening. There would be supper, but no breakfast, lunch or tea. Our diet for the last forty-eight hours had been scrappy in the extreme, and now we found ourselves looking forward to the evening meal with painful fixity. The time was about six a.m.
Gordon Alston and I climbed to the top of a nearby hill, from which we had a view of the surrounding country, and made ourselves as comfortable and as invisible as we could inside a rough circle of stones used as a shelter by the Beduin. A ground-sheet spread across it gave us some shade. As the sun moved across the sky we moved our ground-sheet to keep pace with it. The flies buzzed. I could feel the sweat trickling in a steady stream down my spine.
I thought about food. And drink — long drinks in tall tumblers with the ice clinking against the sides.
Suddenly our day-dreams were interrupted by the sound of bomb-bursts and machine-gun fire. From our look-out, we could see, some miles away, a swarm of enemy aircraft circling and swooping like wasps round a jam pot. Soon, first one column of smoke and then another showed that they had found what they were looking for. Someone, either Paddy Mayne or David, was catching it again. A fighter, on its way to join in the fun flew right over us, without seeing us. Eventually the aircraft went away and did not come back. In the distance we could still see the smoke from the burning trucks curling up into the sky. Once more we settled down to wait for darkness.
From high in the sky the sun blazed down on us. The flies were worse than ever. Whenever one of us hit out at them, the ground-sheet fell down on us. Time passed very slowly. We watched the sun reach its meridian, stay there for what seemed an unconscionable time, and then, almost imperceptibly begin to sink lower. The aircraft did not come back. In another few hours it would be dark. We gave up thinking of imaginary meals and began to visualize our actual rations; the bully, the biscuit and the cup of water. Time passed slower than ever.
Later we made an exciting discovery; two small and very dirty bits of half-melted barley sugar, forgotten in the pocket of my great coat. We ate them greedily. They seemed as stimulating as a stiff whisky. I suppose because we had not had much to eat for some time.
At last the sun set, sinking below the horizon as quickly as it had risen. In the sudden dusk, we walked down from our hilltop towards the ration truck, where a little group was already gathering. The big moment of the day had arrived.
But it was soon past. A spoonful of bully beef is quickly eaten. The camouflage nets were pulled off the trucks and stowed away, and, feeling refreshed, though by no means sated, we started on the next stage of our journey.
After much floundering about in the dark, one or two abortive excursions up wadis that turned out to have no outlet and various other misadventures, we finally emerged from the Gebel into the open desert. The going, by comparison, was now quite good, and in the early hours of the morning by the light of a waning moon, we considerably increased the distance between ourselves and the enemy.
The dawn found us in the middle of a perfectly flat expanse of gravel, stretching as far as the eye could see and dotted here and there with a solitary, scrubby, leafless bush, some eighteen inches high. There can be few places in the world with less natural cover. Hurriedly, before it was quite light, we dispersed the trucks as widely as we could. Then, pulling over them their camouflage nets, enlivened with an occasional twig, we proceeded to convert them into what we hoped optimistically would look from the air like a series of natural mounds or knolls. Having done this, we lay down and composed ourselves hopefully to sleep.
Fortunately on this occasion our powers of camouflage were not put to the test. Inexplicably, no aircraft came our way. Our slumbers were interrupted only by the usual flies, which appeared from nowhere, buzzing gaily in the sun. I spent an hour or so talking to Bob Melot. He had suffered a good deal from the heat and the jolting and he was too weak to hold his own against the flies. But he was as cheerful as ever and talked confidently of getting back home to Alexandria. His cheerfulness made one forget one’s own minor discomforts.
It was September 17th. At nightfall we ate our rations and started off again. We kept going all that night and all the following day. It was a risk driving by day, but, with our supplies of food and water as low as they were, it was one that had to be taken. It was very hot and the soft sand swirled up at us, as though a sand storm were threatening. With seven or eight of us to a jeep, it was not easy to relax, even when one was not actually driving. The sun blazed down relentlessly from a brazen sky. Occasionally someone would go to sleep and fall off, and we had to stop, waiting irritably, while he picked himself up and climbed back on again. The tyres, too, were beginning to feel the strain after so many hundreds of miles of rough going under a hot sun, and punctures came with increasing frequency. Changing a wheel, or digging the jeep out of soft sand began to seem more and more arduous as we grew weaker. Our throats were dry and it required an effort to speak. We counted the hours and minutes which separated us from the blissful moment when we could next allow ourselves to take a pull at the rapidly dwindling supply of warm, dirty, brackish water in our water-bottles.
When we halted at dusk on September 18th, after driving more or less continuously for twenty-four hours, we had covered a considerable distance, and were now not more than twenty or thirty miles from Jalo. Tracks in the sand, made apparently by heavy Italian trucks, led in the direction of the oasis. Once again we took stock of our position.
We had very little petrol left and enough food and water for one more meal. Another four or five hundred miles separated us from Kufra. Everything depended on what we found at Jalo. If it was still in enemy hands, the outlook would be poor.
Our meal that night was on a more luxurious scale than anything that we had tasted for some time. In addition to the usual spoonful of bully beef, we used up some of the remaining water in making some hot porridge and brewed up some tea. We also scraped up enough rum for a small tot all round. This we drank after supper, lying on a little sandbank and watching the sun sinking behind the dunes.
We had all been beginning to feel a bit low, and this unexpected treat restored our spirits. I, for one, will always recall it with pleasure. Indeed, looking back over a varied gastronomic experience, ranging from strawberry messes at Eton and sheep’s entrails in Central Asia to the more sophisticated fare of Larue and La Pérouse, I cannot remember a meal that I enjoyed more or that seemed more wildly and agreeably extravagant. Extravagant it certainly was, for, when we had finished eating, there was no food left at all, and only enough water to half fill one water-bottle for each man.
The next thing was to ascertain unobtrusively how matters stood at Jalo. Sandy Scratchley and I decided to take two jeeps and go and look.
Sandy had come to the S.A.S. from the Fourth County of London Yeomanry. After a brief career as a regular soldier before the war he had left the army to become a steeplechase jockey, a profession in which he very soon made his mark. It was his boast that he had broken every bone in his body and that he was the best-dressed man on the turf. There seemed no reason to doubt the veracity of either claim. One of the Stirling family’s more spectacular motor accidents had accounted for most of the limbs which had escaped fracture in a long series of racing accidents, while, even at this stage of our adventures, Sandy, in a shirt and an old pair of corduroy trousers, with a straggling reddish beard and with sand clogging his shock of curly reddish hair, managed to achieve an appearance that was somehow reminiscent of Newmarket.
We cleaned our Vickers-K guns, drew our ration of water, filled up with petrol and started off, leaving the rest of the party to await our return. In my jeep came Sergeant Seekings, the Cambridgeshire farmer and old S.A.S. operative, the mishap to whose hand had caused him to be left behind when we paid our first visit to Benghazi in the spring. In my pocket I carried my teaspoon. I sincerely hoped that I should before long find a use for it.
It was midnight when we started. Our object was to get as near to the oasis as we could under cover of darkness and then try to find out who was in possession of it. If we ran into an Italian patrol we proposed to make a hasty withdrawal without further ado. If, on the other hand, we were challenged by Sudanese, we should have to try and make them understand who we were, which in the dark and in the absence of any common language was likely to be a no less ticklish operation.
There was no moon and we kept direction as best we could by the stars, one man looking out and one man driving. Mike Sadler, our navigator, who had started us off, had told us that if we kept on a westerly course, we should not have much difficulty in finding the oasis, which covered a comparatively large area.
After we had been jolting along in the dark for
some hours, Sergeant Seekings, who was looking out, drew my attention to a flash of greenish light across the sky in front of us. It was, he said, a green Very light, which was our usual recognition signal. The other jeep had seen it too. They had taken it for a shooting-star, but, on second thoughts, they were not sure.
Should we assume that it was a signal and reply with the appropriate signal of a red, followed by a green light — an unwise proceeding if there happened to be any enemy in the immediate vicinity? Or should we, on the other hand, dismiss the whole thing as an astronomical phenomenon? In the end Seekings won the day. Our Very pistol was produced and fired off twice. First a red, then a green star soared up into the sky, blossomed out, illuminating the surrounding desert as it did so, and faded away. Then we settled down to await some reaction. None came. The shooting-star school of thought made no attempt to disguise their triumph, and elaborated on the folly of advertising our position to everyone in Central Libya by totally uncalled-for firework displays.
Before going any further, we checked up on our position as best we could, and came to the conclusion that we must now be very near the edge of the oasis. There seemed very little to be gained by pushing on any further in the few hours that remained before dawn. Indeed it seemed quite likely that, if we did so, we might blunder into unnecessary trouble. We accordingly revised our plans and decided to stay where we were for the time being and move on just before first light. Each of us took turns at keeping watch, while the rest slept. We were by now all very tired and were glad of the rest.
Before going to sleep, I finished what was left of my water. It was a comfort to take a good long pull at it after so many days of sipping, and as I drained the last tepid drops, I reflected that the next day was in any case likely to solve the water problem radically one way or the other.
The brief grey twilight that precedes the dawn showed, as we had expected, the palm trees of Jalo a few miles away on the western horizon. Nothing else was in sight. There were no signs of any human activity. We got back into our jeeps and drove cautiously towards Jalo.
Eastern Approaches Page 28