by Denis Avey
In every dicey situation in the desert to date I’d told myself that too much thought wasted time and that could mean the bullet. You didn’t have to think, you had to do. It was my mantra for survival. Instinct told me the right option was to stay frozen to the spot. I waited. The seconds ticked by but he didn’t raise the alarm. Instead, he looked left and then right and stepped slowly backwards away from the edge of the wadi then turned and walked away and out of sight. I dropped back into the ravine and hastily retraced my steps back to the rest of the platoon. I knew he had seen me and might raise the alarm sooner or later. We had been hopelessly compromised and we slipped away into the night.
We captured four prisoners during that patrol. I grabbed one of them and it was child’s play. He was walking around quite alone, oblivious to who was out there. He was tall for an Italian and, despite the dark, I could tell he was clean-shaven and wearing a blue-grey forage cap. I had to get him unawares and that meant stalking him until I was in a position to make a move. I swapped my revolver to my left hand and jumped him from behind, pulling his right arm up behind his back and jabbing the gun in his ribs, withdrawing it quickly in case he spun around. The terror in his eyes told me he got the message.
There was no struggle and I didn’t have to say a word. He knew the game was up and he came quietly. But that’s when it can get tricky. Once a captive is over the initial shock and knows he is not about to die, if he is any kind of soldier at all he will start looking to turn the tables. I was lucky. My prisoner was petrified and stayed that way until we handed him over later that night and we could finally hit the sack.
Each patrol was becoming a battle for survival. The Italians weren’t all Jessies, despite what people made out, and every exchange with the enemy often came down to kill or be killed. I concentrated on staying focused. Occasionally we would get mail from home, passed down the line to us, dog-eared and dusty. Most of the boys scrambled to get hold of the letters before running off to plonk themselves down against the wheel of a truck to read them with smiles of recognition fluttering across their faces at remembrances of home.
I couldn’t do that. Home was warmth and civilisation and where I was now just wasn’t civilised. I glanced at the letters from my mother and put them away unread. When you speak a language, you think that language. My mother, bless her soul, spoke the language of home. That didn’t belong in the desert so, purely for self-preservation, I refused to read her letters. They would have blunted my purpose and made my survival less likely. It might just mean milliseconds but in that time you can get killed. I was closing down still further. In different ways, we all were. I carried a great wodge of those letters with me and didn’t read them until I was back in Cairo.
The events of one patrol were to stay with me. The worst of it is, seventy years on, I can barely recall where we were or what we were doing but I can feel it all right. I can still feel everything about it, even now. Patrols were becoming routine, and each one began like the last and ended with us collapsing onto our bedrolls just before the dawn light drove back the stars. I know we were doing a reconnaissance of an Italian position somewhere on the fringes of Tobruk. It was a sizeable camp with strong defences and I feared there’d be some surprises.
I had taken to carrying a knife on patrol. It wasn’t a standard issue weapon but it was handy. I had picked it up early on, along with a 9mm Beretta automatic which I had stripped from a surrendering Italian officer. I carried that in a tiny holster under my arm whilst the knife was in a sheath that I had made myself. It was just six inches long, but it was sharpened on both edges and came to a needle-sharp point. I had removed the hilt for a better grip and I knew how to use it. You never grasped a knife in the fist, stabbing downwards like a Hollywood killer. Do that and you’re dead: by the time you had raised the blade you’d probably received one in the guts yourself. A fighting blade was always held upwards with the pommel pressed into the palm of the hand and the thumb flat on the steel.
The platoon was spread out around the camp and we had all been given different tasks. I hated patrols where we were so far apart. You were really alone. I knew if I got into a jam it was down to me to fix it quickly and quietly. Shooting would wake the whole camp. I had no intention of ending up in a shallow hole with sand shovelled on my face.
I was somewhere in the outer defences crouching down when I saw him, standing in the shadows just a couple of yards away. I had no real cover other than the night but he hadn’t seen me yet. I knew this was bad, very bad. Any moment now he would spot me and the shooting match would start. The wrong decision and I was done for. I took the knife in my hand. There was a sound. He moved; he’d seen me. I sprang on him from the darkness, thrusting the blade up and in below his ribcage. He went down silently and I felt his weight momentarily on my arm as he sagged to the earth and stayed down.
My first response was relief. He could have killed me, but I’d survived. All that bayonet training back home hadn’t helped prepare me for this. The screaming, shouting and aggression was designed to make you do it without thinking. This was different – silent, done in the shadows, and I had felt his body weight on me in the darkness. It was him or me. That is how it is in bloody war. You make excuses to yourself all the time.
Back then, I simply thought I’ve got away with it; I’m alive. I just wanted to get back to the desert and the rest of the patrol quickly. I had prevented the operation being compromised and I reported what had happened. There wasn’t so much as a thank you.
He was the only man I killed with my bare hands, but it affected me all right, that one. You never forget it, never. A memory is lodged in the mind but a feeling inhabits the whole body. And I have carried the feeling of that night with me for the last seven decades.
Chapter 4
We were getting ready to attack Tobruk, harassing the enemy in the night using the Bren guns and a navy bombardment was coming to soften up the Italian defences. There was still some light when we parked up in the carriers. To one side of the track was a cliff, perhaps fifty feet high. Looking the other way, we could see the Mediterranean.
Instinct is a fine thing in war and it is usually wise to heed it. I had a strange feeling and suggested that we should move the carriers further along the road. Minutes later there was a deafening blast, sending shock waves through the carriers and everyone in them. The sound rumbled around, reverberating off the rocks and our ears were left squealing with that high-pitched sound you get after an explosion. Our language was unrepeatable. The Royal Navy could deliver a devastating punch and you were better out of the way when it did. Their opening shot had fallen close to where we had been just minutes before.
Normally I’d have said to myself, ‘A miss is as good as a mile’, but that was just the first shell and a naval bombardment is not something to witness at close quarters. Before the dust settled I slammed the carrier into gear and we were on the move. It was just as well because another friendly shell thumped into the rock face close behind us. We didn’t stop.
The attack began early in the morning with the Australians hitting the defences from the south. We could see thick black smoke coming from the docks where the Italians had set fire to oil tanks. Their cruiser, the San Giorgio, was in the harbour after being badly damaged by the RAF. They beached her and set her on fire as well.
One of our officers, Tom Bird, broke through the defences with the ‘S’ Company carriers, capturing scores of guns, 2,000 prisoners and, best of all, the contents of an Italian officers’ mess. The tanks came in behind him and white flags started appearing everywhere. They took more than 25,000 prisoners in Tobruk, but ‘Electric Whiskers’ wasn’t one of them. He’d slipped away again.
The Italians had done a lot of damage to the harbour but the best news was there was lots of water in the reservoirs to quench our thirst.
Now Tobruk had fallen we could return to our nomadic ways and around then I got to know one of our best officers, 2nd Lieutenant Mike Mosley. It didn’t start well.
I was driving a truck with him in the passenger seat when we hit soft sand and the wheels started spinning hopelessly. We were soon up to the axles and going nowhere fast. He wasn’t exactly pleased.
‘Didn’t you see it?’ he asked. ‘What kind of a driver are you, Avey? You’re supposed to look where you’re going.’
I was stung. I didn’t take comments like that from anyone, officer or not. I fancied I was a good driver and the snipe was worse coming from an officer I really respected. I bit my lip and that was rare in those days. With Mosley looking on, we began digging the truck out, laying out the perforated metal sand-trays to give the tyres something to bite on and we were soon back on the road.
I usually drove a Bren gun carrier. Someone had spotted I was a handy mechanic. The carriers were nippy enough, you could get nearly 40 mph out of them and despite their clunky tracks and their armour plate, they were manoeuvrable. You steered with fine movements of the wheel. Turn left to brake the left track and you pivoted round it, turn the wheel right and you did the opposite.
A bit later we were on a dusty hillside. A lengthy column of trucks had parked up along an escarpment track, pressed tightly against the uphill side of the road. The other edge was marked by a drop sheer enough to make you queasy.
Mike Mosley spotted me in my carrier. ‘Take me along the column and back,’ he said, climbing in and standing bolt upright in the commander’s seat. He obviously wanted to be seen by the troops as if he was expecting to take a drive-by salute. My chance had come. I turned the switch to bring on the ignition light and pressed the starter button. The V-8 engine spluttered into life. I slammed it into gear and slithered off. I was soon accelerating without mercy as Mosley hung on to the armour plating trying to keep his breakfast down and staring into the void. With just twelve inches to spare on each side I reached full speed with my eyes fixed on the narrow track and Mosley looking increasingly green around the gills. A minor flick of the wheel would have locked one of the tracks and we’d have been airborne. It put the wind up him all right. I turned at the end of the column and repeated the trick before the clouds of dust from the first pass had settled. He climbed out, just managing a stifled thank you. ‘Touché,’ I said to myself. I’d made my point. He was pretty civil after that.
‘B’ Company was under the command of Major Viscount Hugo Garmoyle and we were sent ahead of the rest of the battalion. We were behind the tanks, heading across the desert on the way to Benghazi, the next big target. The landscape became increasingly barren the further we got from the sea. Fifty miles inland, vegetation was sparse, the landscape was dry and stony with patches of reddish sift-sand, occasional hills and deep depressions or nullahs that had been scoured into the landscape.
It was good to be alongside Les again for the first time since getting out on the blue. As a Lance-Sergeant he was the carrier commander. He got things done and he trusted me. Not even the desert sores, terrible grub and lack of proper sleep dented his humour. He was still sharp.
On the evening of 23 January the armour ahead of us got into a major duffy with the Italians on the track to Mechili. They were up against seventy tanks, who put up quite a fight. Our lot knocked out nine of theirs but we paid a hefty price. It was all over when we caught up. The Italian tanks were smashed and left littered across the desert. Heaven help anyone in there, I thought to myself looking at a burnt-out Italian M13. Their armour was like cheese. Those inside had simply fried.
One of the others had clambered on to an M13 which at first glance didn’t look as badly damaged. ‘Oh my God, look at this. There’s someone alive in this one,’ he said. The soldier was standing at the side of the turret and he had one hand on the stubby barrel, staring through the hatch, unable to pull himself away.
I swung up under the gun and looked in. The tank commander was inside and still sitting down. His guts were spread out, dark and crimson all across his lap. He moved just slightly. It would have been ridiculous to try to lift him out. He would have been in agony and he wasn’t going to live long anyway.
For a moment I was seventeen years old again and back in Essex. I was on a pheasant shoot with my father and his friends. We were walking with the dogs bounding around us in the deep undergrowth. I was enjoying the warm weather and the adult company. There was a distant flapping as one of the dogs put a cock pheasant to flight a hundred yards away. I raised the shotgun and fired the barrel with the chokebore to get the range, feeling the recoil in my shoulder. I watched the bird come down and knew I’d killed it. The dogs retrieved it and I tramped back through the long grass to the party, holding it aloft by the tail feathers, beaming proudly. But when I saw my father’s face I knew instantly something was wrong.
‘I suppose you think that was a good shot,’ he said.
‘Yes, I do,’ I replied.
‘Well it wasn’t, I can tell you. At that distance it was purely accidental.’
I knew better than to protest.
‘You could have wounded that bird at that range and it would have been in pain for days. Now get off the shoot.’
My father had always taught me to respect people and animals but I was humiliated in front of all those men. He was right, of course, but I hated it at the time. I turned and left in shame.
Now, not many years later, I was standing on an Italian tank looking down on a man who had been an enemy but was now a suffering human being with no prospect of life.
I never saw his face, thankfully, but I raised my weapon and did what I thought was right. I was reported for that and I had to go and speak to a senior officer later that day. He was sitting on a pile of wooden boxes. He wanted to hear the whole story and, as a seasoned soldier, I think he understood. No more was said about it.
I decided not to sleep below the carrier that night and dug my usual grave-shaped sand bed away from the vehicles but still safely within the leaguer. I checked my weapons and turned in along with the rest – no hearty campfires of brothers in arms below a desert sky, just dog-tired men sleeping in the sand.
In the desert I always slept with my ears cocked. The slightest unfamiliar noise and I was there, alert and ready. It got worse the more patrols I did. I knew how easy it was to slip into a camp undetected at night; to move around in the shadows, smelling the domestic smells, even hearing ‘O Sole Mio’ sung by men who felt completely safe. I also knew that a soldier entering an enemy camp at night would be fired up, ready to kill to escape. He’d do what I had done.
It was the miserable sound of rain that woke me. I fumbled around in the wet, dark sand until my hands settled on the cold, knobbly metal of the Mills bombs and breathed a little easier. The Beretta was still under my arm and the .38 was in reach. Prepared, I drifted back into a sort of sleep listening to the patter of rain and the distant sound of snoring. Later I woke shivering, with an unexpected weight pressing down on me. The bedroll was stiff and I could barely move. It was covered in ice.
Next, it was on to Fort Mechili. We meant to cut off the Italians but we just missed them. Our maps weren’t up to much and they found a way out on a track we didn’t know about. They had abandoned the whole position overnight leaving vehicles and stores behind. Once again they were retreating.
These long journeys in a carrier were not pleasant. It was open to the elements. The driver’s seat could be dropped in combat so you were below the armour plating but you were fully exposed when driving and the drag created a vacuum, pulling airborne sand in around you and coating everything. We were close to Fort Mechili when a violent khamsin whipped up from nowhere. It would be bully-beef and gravel for dinner as usual.
The convoy pulled up for a break and before I could get out Eddie Richardson was alongside.
‘You won’t get into Shepheard’s looking like that, old chap,’ he said.
The sand glued to my cheeks cracked as I smiled. I climbed out, flicked the dust from my stiff hair using both hands, took a swig of waxy water and went to work. The tracks on a Bren carrier needed a lot of attention, espec
ially on stony ground. I began by checking the pivot pins that linked each segment of the tracks together. A carrier without its tracks was a sitting target, so any doubts and I would swap them. I’d knock out the old pin using a heavy hammer and bash in the replacement, chasing the old one out. It would be good for a few more miles.
On 28 January we settled down to hold the fort and maintain the carriers, and the rest of 2RB caught up with us a few days later. They’d had a bit of a time with the Italian air force, with fighters strafing them and a few very near misses from bombers. They were told they could have a breather, and that we wouldn’t have to move again for the best part of two weeks.
That was a good joke as it turned out. Two weeks turned out to be more like two hours.
The trucks had their bonnets up, the lads were washing and shaving. Some of the officers had gone on leave or were getting ready to go. That was when the big cheese, General ‘Jumbo’ Wilson, arrived. The buzz soon spread. Something big was happening. The RAF had spotted long columns of enemy leaving Benghazi and the top brass guessed rightly the Italians were quitting the whole area, leaving Cyrenaica. We were well inland, in the middle of a bulge of Africa sticking up north into the Mediterranean. The Italians were departing down the left-hand coast of that bulge. A hundred and fifty miles of desert lay between them and us. A bold strike could deliver a decisive blow but it was a journey, we were told later, that not even camel trains would attempt. We grabbed what sleep we could.
It was a race. At first light, engines spluttered and the column began to roll, tanks, armoured cars, trucks and the carriers in a long line, spread out against air attack. If the whole Italian army was really on the move, we would still be heavily outnumbered even if we got there in time to block their way. That first eighty miles was purgatory. It was a forbidding landscape scattered with slab-rocks and scoured with wadis and hidden patches of sift-sand. If you drifted into one of those you’d be there until next Christmas. Tracked vehicles like the one I was driving were bucking and rearing over the boulders, ditches and camels humps, constantly at risk of shedding a track. I replaced at least twelve pins to keep the carrier rolling on that journey alone. It was imperative to look after it. No feet, no horse, as simple as that. All our vehicles were long overdue for proper repair. The light tanks kept breaking down and had to be left behind with their crews, hoping for recovery.