Target Tobruk: Yeoman in the Western Desert

by Robert Jackson

  Yeoman peered skywards again. The four bombers had turned and were flying off towards the west, still in perfect formation.

  ‘Crafty bastards,’ the pilot said, shouting above the din. ‘They were Italians. Nobody to touch them for high-level bombing. Their game is to keep the guns occupied and give the Stukas a chance. Look!’

  The Stuka formation was turning towards the south, the Germans’ intention clearly to dive on the fortress out of the sun. They were carefully keeping out of range until the last moment. In the meantime, two more formations of Italian bombers came swinging in over the coast, like silvery fish in the brilliant sunlight, and the Tobruk antiaircraft barrage turned its full fury on them. The air rang with the clang of metal as the gunners slammed home the long shells. The barrels turned menacingly in response to shouted orders as the predictors pinpointed the altitude of the incoming bombers.

  Close by Navy House, on the high ground, there was a sandbagged emplacement surmounted by a battery of loudspeakers. From this excellent vantage point, commanding a view of the whole harbour, a gunnery officer controlled the Tobruk barrage. Now, above the drone of engines and the hundred other sounds, his voice rang out clearly.

  ‘Tobruk — engage!’

  With a massive, skull-splitting crash, every gun around the harbour sent its shells blasting towards the enemy in a single salvo. Dazed by the noise, their ears ringing, Yeoman and Kemp kept their eyes on the Italian formation. After a delay that seemed endless, the small white puffs of the shell-bursts spattered the sky around the bombers.

  The Italians cruised serenely on. Seconds later, Yeoman heard the howl of their bombs and dragged Kemp to the ground an instant before the first stick exploded a bare hundred yards away with a series of terrific bangs, pulverizing a cluster of already badly damaged buildings near the quay. Yeoman and Kemp, who were without steel helmets, covered their heads as best they could as stones and debris showered the area like hail, accompanied by clouds of choking, swirling dust. More bombs fell in the vicinity of the harbour and the town itself, choking the streets with more rubble. Pillars of smoke boiled upwards, brown and evil, dragging dust and powdered cement into their vortices until the sun shone pale and murkily through an opaque veil.

  The 3.7s fired another salvo, and once more the Italian bombers were boxed by the smoke of the bursts. Again they cruised on, apparently untouched. Then, suddenly, a cheer went up from the gunners as one of the bombers began to trail a slender, almost imperceptible thread of smoke. The trail became thicker and the bomber turned, losing height and dropping out of the formation. White flames burst from ruptured fuel tanks and its dive became steeper until it was plunging vertically, the smoke of its fall marking the sky like a dark crayon-line. It fell several miles away, up the coast. Parachutes, two tiny white dots against the blue, broke away and drifted slowly out to sea.

  There was no time for jubilation. Yeoman burrowed deeper against the protective wall of the gun pit as the sound he had come to hate and fear in France, during that long retreat of May 1940, split the sky: the rending screech of a diving Junkers 87 Stuka. Like great, malignant birds of prey the gull-winged dive-bombers came howling down on the harbour, braving a barrage of Bofors shells that swept the sky up to three thousand feet. The guns, magnificently co-ordinated, traversed the area above the harbour in regular patterns, scattering chains of fire in the path of the enemy aircraft.

  It seemed incredible that anything could survive such an inferno, yet the Stukas screamed down through the ack-ack bursts in line astern unharmed and pulled out of their dives, the black, sinister eggs of their bombs curving down to explode among the gun emplacements. Yeoman’s breath was knocked from his body as the earth heaved under him. The crash of successive bomb-bursts blotted out everything, blinding and suffocating. It seemed as though the whole world were dissolving in tortured darkness. He clasped his hands over his ears, willing the nightmare to go away, but it went on without end, until every nerve in his body screamed at him to run, to jump to his feet and risk the sleet of steel, to fill his lungs with air again, even though death might follow the next instant.

  Suddenly, there was silence. Beside him, curled into a ball, Kemp trembled and whimpered. Groggily, Yeoman reached out and grasped his shoulder. The trembling subsided and Kemp rose to his knees, his face ashen, shaking his head from side to side. Yeoman looked at him with sympathy.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  Kemp nodded. ‘Sorry about that.’ The words came jerkily. ‘Got bombed to hell in Norway, and I always get the shakes. It doesn’t last long.’ He looked around to see if the gunners had noticed his fear, but their attention was focused on a nearby gun pit, which had received a very near miss. Shouts and cries of pain cut through the dust-laden air. Yeoman and Kemp joined the rush to help, only to throw themselves flat on the ground as ammunition stacked near the gun pit began to explode, sparked off by a fierce blaze.

  A blackened figure, its clothing in rags, stumbled from the smoke, groping blindly towards safety. The man had taken only a few steps when he was cut down by flying shrapnel. A high-pitched scream came from the swirling murk that surrounded the shattered gun pit and was cut off abruptly as more explosions cracked out.

  The echoes died away, leaving an unreal silence. Slowly, cautiously, the gunners moved forward to retrieve the bodies of their comrades.

  Yeoman looked up towards Navy House. Already someone had hauled down the red flag, and work on unloading the freighter, which had escaped undamaged apart from a few splinter scars, continued almost as though nothing had happened. For the first time, Yeoman sensed the immense spirit that pervaded the Tobruk garrison, a determination not to be beaten, no matter what the cost. Suddenly, he felt enormously gratified to be there, to be part of this supreme defiance.

  George, he told himself, as Bluey drove him back to the airstrip later that afternoon, away from the smoke and the stench of Tobruk towards the cleaner air of the escarpment, you’re in danger of letting pride overwhelm reason. Tobruk’s a bloody awful place, and you know it. But you also know that you wouldn’t change places with anyone.

  Two weeks later, he was no longer so sure.

  Chapter Four

  Yeoman would always remember his stay in Tobruk as an eternal, savage battle against insects. At night, following the legions of flies that made daylight hours a torment, came the fleas; the vicious, hardy desert vermin that crawled in an itching, stabbing procession over a man’s body after nightfall until he thought he would go crazy through lack of sleep. Every one of the thirty thousand men in the Tobruk garrison was prey to the creatures, the troops in the forward perimeter suffering worst of all.

  Yeoman was luckier than most. Living in a tent on the airstrip for most of the time, close to his sandbagged, camouflaged Hurricane, he escaped the majority of the severe bombing attacks that blasted the harbour area several times a day, and was not forced to share the agony of the perimeter troops who had to contend with enemy raids by day and the insect hordes by night.

  The Hurricanes of No. 6 Squadron had gone, the survivors withdrawn to Egypt, and apart from the occasional, communications aircraft which managed to creep in after dark, his fighter was the only intact aircraft left within the Tobruk perimeter. Although enemy reconnaissance machines took a close look at the airstrip on more than one occasion, the camouflage did its work well and the Luftwaffe left the strip alone, in the belief that there was no longer an RAF presence there.

  A small nucleus of ground personnel remained, dedicated to maintaining what was left of the facilities on the airstrip and ensuring that Yeoman’s Hurricane was kept in airworthy condition. Some of the airmen had been in Tobruk since the time of its original capture, and seemed to have come to terms with living conditions in the desert. Yeoman’s rigger, a stocky corporal from Newcastle named Riley, kept a small menagerie of lizards and tame mice.

  ‘The lizard’s one of our best friends, sir,’ he explained one day. ‘Watch.’ He pointed to a large de
sert sore on his leg, on the fringes of which bloated flies were clustered like pigs around a feeding trough, and brought one of his pet lizards close to it, stroking the creature’s palpitating flank with the tip of his index finger. An instant later the lizard’s long tongue flicked out, and the flies disappeared as if by magic. ‘See what I mean?’ said Riley cheerfully. Yeoman felt sick, but took the point.

  He soon discovered that the mice, too, were highly functional. The trick was to put a couple of mice in one’s sleeping bag for half an hour after turning in, then set them free. Usually the fleas migrated from their human hosts to the luckless animals, permitting at least an hour or two of civilized sleep. The mice seemed to suffer no ill effect; on the contrary, they thrived on human care, and some became so tame that they even answered to their names. Fantastic stakes were laid on mouse races, in which the mice proved exceptionally unco-operative.

  Yeoman learned, too, to be constantly on guard against scorpions, deadly pests which were killed on sight. Desert centipedes, which grew to an amazing size, were less obvious pests; although relatively harmless, they had to be removed from exposed skin with great care. One of the airmen brushed a centipede off his arm in the opposite direction to which the insect was travelling, and had a long strip of skin ripped away by the creature’s hooked claws. The wound turned septic, and the man needed hospital treatment.

  Reconnaissance sorties, always at low level, were usually flown at dawn or last night, to lessen the possibility of running into enemy aircraft. Yeoman was briefed to keep within a fifty-mile radius of the Tobruk perimeter and to avoid the airfield at El Adem, where the enemy had built up a considerable concentration of aircraft. Sometimes he was ordered to fly out to sea, ranging eastwards as far as the Gulf of Sollum in search of overdue vessels on the ‘Spud Run’, as the Navy’s supply operation was nicknamed.

  It was the ships of the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Inshore Squadron that bore the brunt of supplying the besieged Tobruk garrison, and the heaviest burden of all was carried by five destroyers of the Royal Australian Navy; HMAS Stuart, Vampire, Vendetta, Voyager and Waterhen. They were elderly ships and Yeoman came to know them all, feeling a great upsurge of affection and admiration whenever he caught sight of one of them, ploughing her way along the coast from Alexandria. Day after day they battled their way through, fighting off the dive-bombers that came down like an avalanche from the cloudless skies. Hardly a destroyer reached the garrison without being attacked, but somehow, miraculously, they continued to survive.

  Other ships were not so lucky. As the weeks went by, the Inshore Squadron acquired an extraordinary collection of craft, including battered, rusting Greek steamers, captured Italian schooners and angular, strange-looking vessels which the Navy called ‘A’ Lighters. They were the forerunners of the Tank Landing Craft which would later form the spearhead of the Allied invasion of Europe. They carried not only tanks to Tobruk, but also dangerous cargoes of petrol, mines and ammunition. They were painfully slow and ill-armed, and the passage through ‘Bomb Alley’ — that most heavily attacked stretch of coast between Sollum and Bardia — was a nightmare for their crews.

  In the last days of April most were sent to Greece to assist in the final evacuation of Allied forces. None returned.

  Some of the tramp steamers on the ‘Spud Run’ took a fearful hammering. One morning, Yeoman was ordered to take off to try and locate a Greek ship which, having successfully made the run through Bomb Alley, was reportedly being attacked by Stukas several miles further along the coast. He had no difficulty in finding the vessel, for its position was marked by a tall column of smoke, stark and black against the rising sun. The Stukas had done their work and gone, leaving the ship listing and in flames, and yet the crew were still making desperate attempts to save her. It was a hopeless battle. Yeoman circled the stricken freighter, watching helplessly as her list increased. Suddenly, more smoke, shot with vivid flame, boiled up as an explosion ripped her foredeck apart. After that, it was all over in seconds. The ship turned over, exposing her rusted, barnacle-encrusted bottom, and slid tiredly under the surface, leaving a spreading pool of burning fuel oil and a handful of struggling survivors. Yeoman passed a fix over the radio and continued to circle the spot until his fuel ran dangerously low, compelling him to turn for base. He later learned that a destroyer had steamed to the spot with all speed, but no survivors had been picked up.

  There was enormous courage and dedication among those ships’ crews, and from these qualities legends were born. Pegleg Phillips was one of them.

  Yeoman’s first meeting with Lieutenant-Commander Alistair Phillips, DSO, DSC, RNR, came shortly after dawn one day during the second week of May, when he dived low over the Mediterranean to take a look at a schooner that was nosing her way under full sail towards Tobruk. She was flying a large Italian flag, which puzzled the pilot, for the presence of an enemy sailing craft so close to the Tobruk garrison was unlikely. He circled the schooner a couple of times, then came in low and placed a short burst from his guns fifty yards ahead of her bow. The Italian flag disappeared as if by magic, and was replaced by a White Ensign. At the same time, a signal lamp flashed from the vessel’s wheelhouse. Although he was no expert in the Morse code, Yeoman had no trouble in making out the two-word message, which was a very rude and unmistakably Anglo-Saxon invitation to him to absent himself. He replied by roaring over the schooner at mast height, rocking his wings derisively as he climbed away towards Tobruk.

  Later, when he reported sighting the strange schooner, Russell Kemp laughed hugely.

  ‘That’ll be the Contessa Maria,’ he grinned. ‘There’s no mistaking old Pegleg Phillips’ style. Something must have held him up; he usually sneaks in before dawn.’

  ‘Sounds a bit piratical,’ said Yeoman.

  ‘Oh, he’s a hell of a character all right. He must be getting on for sixty. By rights, the Naval Reserve should have thrown him out ages ago. He commanded Q-ships in the last war, and got quite a reputation for himself.’

  ‘Q-ships?’ the pilot queried.

  ‘That’s what they called specially converted merchantmen, stuffed with hidden guns,’ Kemp volunteered. ‘They were mostly small tramp steamers, trawlers or schooners, and they used to go out and sail around in areas where U-boats were known to be lurking. The theory was that any submarine commander worth his salt wouldn’t waste a torpedo on one of them, but come to the surface and sink her with gunfire. Then bang! Exit U-boat.

  ‘Anyhow, the theory didn’t quite work in Pegleg’s case, because some U-boat skipper who must have had a nasty, devious streak put a tinfish into him before surfacing. Poor old Pegleg couldn’t bring his guns to bear, as his ship was listing, but he managed to bring her round and ram the sub before she capsized. The story has it that Pegleg and the Jerry skipper were floundering about in the water, beating hell out of each other, with their respective crews cheering them on. Sounds a bit of a tall one to me, but knowing Pegleg it might just happen to be true. Well, a British cruiser picked them all up a few hours later, and Pegleg got the DSC. Incidentally, don’t be misled by the “Pegleg” nickname. He hasn’t got an artificial leg, but he walks as though he had. Fact of the matter is, he fell down a companionway after a piss-up in the wardroom years ago, and smashed his knee!’

  ‘How does he come to be mixed up in this lot, and at his age?’ Yeoman wanted to know.

  ‘Oh, Pegleg’s got a lot of friends in very high places,’ said Kemp. ‘Besides, he’s an expert at slipping into and out of tight spots. He spent a lot of years on the China Station after the war, mainly on anti-piracy work. Got up to all sorts of skulduggery, smashing pirate gangs, gun runners and all sorts. Besides, how many people do you know who can sail a schooner? I’m damned if I can.’

  The Contessa Maria entered Tobruk harbour two hours later. Yeoman and Kemp went down to watch her as she berthed, the pilot noticing that she bore the scars of many conflicts. Recent paintwork failed to conceal the patched-up bullet and splinter holes
along her sides, relics of the times when Messerschmitts and Stukas had swept down on her, their pilots doubtless thinking her an easy victim. Yet each time, the redoubtable Phillips had brought her through.

  Phillips, who came stumping ashore as soon as the unloading of the schooner’s precious cargo was well under way, was everything Yeoman had expected. Despite the tufts of pure white hair which escaped from beneath his cap at various points, he looked a good ten years younger than he actually was. He was a big, muscular man with light grey eyes, and the exposed parts of his body were the colour of teak. Besides his cap, a greasy affair upon which the badge of a naval officer could vaguely be distinguished, his only other dress consisted of sandals and a pair of ragged shorts.

  Phillips greeted Kemp, then the luminous grey eyes turned on Yeoman and the pilot felt as though his brain were being pulled apart. Kemp introduced them, and Phillips nodded slowly.

  ‘You must be the chap who came after me this morning.’ he said. ‘Well, you’re a bloody rotten shot.’

  ‘I wasn’t aiming to hit you, sir,’ Yeoman pointed out. ‘I spotted the Italian flag, and wanted to make sure of your identity. If anyone had opened fire on me, I’d have hit you all right.’

  Phillips grinned and rubbed his nose. ‘Good lad,’ he said, ‘that’s the stuff. As a matter of fact, I usually strike my false colours as soon as I get through Bomb Alley. I must admit that I forgot about it this morning.’

  He glanced at his watch, then at the sky. ‘We were very late getting away from Mersa Matruh,’ he muttered, half to himself. ‘I like to be on my way back by this time. Let’s hope the Jerries have slept in. In the meantime, I could murder a bottle of beer. What about it, young Kemp?’

  They went up to Navy House, where Phillips sank gratefully into a chair, relaxing and stretching his injured leg. The first bottle of beer went down his throat without a pause; the second he sipped in leisurely fashion, and talked at some length about the war situation. He had taken part in the evacuation of Allied forces from Greece during the last days of April, and had some very definite ideas about the operation.