by C Brazier
The remaining few hours were devoted to evacuating as many refugees as possible from the port and, as usual on these occasions many pathetic scenes were witnessed. Incidentally, Yugoslav, Japanese, Polish and Czech Consuls and their staffs were put off in one small steamer which was generally adjudged to be a fair replica of the Tower of Babel, or as one of the sappers observed, ‘like the ruddy League of Nations itself’.
Final arrangements for demolition were complete, except in the case of one oil installation where the manager had pro-Axis sympathies. Up to this point nothing could be done, but now the course was clear and, after ten minutes brisk engagement by our chaps, the place was in their hands, all the defenders having either been killed or driven off.
As the Germans entered the town, they managed to blow up or fire all their objectives. The petrol refineries were left ablaze from end to end; many industrial plants were wrecked, including a brewery, engineering works and machine shops in the area of the docks. The gas works were wrecked and left burning; similarly a large flourmill was fired.
In the docks, cranes, locomotives and rail wagons were destroyed and dropped over the quay into the harbour. Stacks of timber and all warehouses were set alight and water mains outside the area cut. In those last few hectic hours a large power station suffered the same fate. Craft of all description were either sent to sea or sunk in the harbour. The spectacle of that scene of desolation and destruction, with its raging fires and pall of heavy black smoke drifting away across the landscape was impressive.
By a marvellous stroke of good luck, on the seaward journey from Salonika, they met another of our sections that had been at Volos about 100 miles south of Salonika. There the Germans had heavily bombarded the place and had, themselves, destroyed the oil storage plant of the Shell Company. This enabled the British party to cooperate with a Greek Naval Commander in the destruction of a fort; guns were put out of action and magazines blown up before leaving. When the various sections of the party met at Athens they all had the same report to deliver to higher authority.
But Athens did not turn out to be a rest camp. With the enemy sweeping through Greece, small parties went forward to destroy an aerodrome under construction at Arexos and to blow up bomb dumps and petrol stores. This was a heart-breaking task indeed as thousands of pounds worth of valuable machinery had been sent out from home to assist our Allies in their war effort. But there was no alternative. It had to be done rather than make a present of the equipment to the Germans. There can be no half-hearted application of the scorched earth policy when it becomes a necessity and is dictated by the military situation.
The Greeks put up a magnificent fight and as is now generally recognized, were more than a match for the Italians in spite of the latter’s boastings and propaganda but, when the largest military power on the continent delivered that treacherous blow on their flank, there could only be one end. Although our Allies fought with courage and tenacity, it was only a matter of time, and ‘time’ was certainly not on their side in this case.
In common with others in the Expeditionary Force, the party sustained casualties and in fighting a rearguard action to the beaches some were captured, but a large proportion got away and was evacuated to Crete.
Chapter Sixteen
MIDDLE EAST
The party that left us and went to Greece had a fairly lengthy follow-up to their adventures in that historic land. They escaped to Crete where, after a few days respite they were in the war once again. Several thousand airborne German troops came down from the skies and after a very hard fought battle the Germans got a foothold when they seized Maleme air field. They were then heavily reinforced by air and the capture of the island was inevitable. Some were taken prisoner and sent to Germany. Among these was Second Lieutenant Dennis Alabaster, a young regular officer who had joined us at Gravesend, he managed to escape from a POW train and joined the Chetniks in Yugoslavia. Sadly we heard through our Mission that he had been killed in the fighting there. Others of the party sleep their last in the soil of Crete, but it is the remainder who escaped that concern us here.
The majority of our party got away under cover of darkness and steered a course for safety. They had water but very little food; nonetheless friendly craft helped them during the course of the passage. Providence was kind in the matter of a fair wind, and the blue waters of the Eastern Mediterranean treated them well.
Except for the glare that harassed their eyes and the attentions of enemy aircraft during the day, it was not a bad passage. Sometimes these planes would fly low and suspiciously circle the craft only to make off apparently satisfied; on occasions they would liven up the proceedings with a burst of machine-gun fire, but without serious results. The men would lower themselves over the side for a bathe to cool off. There was much talk about the meals they were going to have when they got ashore. The nights were cold and with the exception of the watch the human cargo huddled together for warmth. They eventually landed safely.
The survivors were initially stationed in Palestine, that land of contrasts where ancient civilization meets rocky barrenness and a fringe of cultivation here and there joins the sweltering coastal plain.
For a time a detachment left for Syria and were mixed up in the fighting against French Vichy Forces. One incident subsequently commented upon in official dispatches was when the officer in charge, together with a corporal, were flown behind the enemy lines and landed near a steel girder bridge vital to the opposing forces’ withdrawal. Under cover of darkness the following night, they stealthily approached their objective and, overcoming the guard on the abutment, laid their charges. With the first streak of light, ‘when dawn’s left hand is in the sky’, they blew up a span, withdrew to the agreed rendezvous and were flown back behind our lines. This journey back was interesting as they passed over a full scale engagement between the opposing forces, and saw below what resembled a cloth model of a battlefield. ‘Just one more job’.
But life was not to continue on these lines, and before long they were back in the building and lading side of their craft. Seemingly endless miles of roads were the order of the day, sometimes with all modern mechanical aids, but not infrequently just humping and shovelling, much as the ancients had done for centuries; real back aching work. However it was not without its compensations, for the food was good, fruit and vegetables plentiful and tobacco easily obtainable even if of a peculiar quality and flavour. Cigarettes were said to be made of ‘camel droppings and palm fibre’ although in due course it was said that the fibre had become scarce.
Some months went by and prospects became dull. It looked as if they might end their days on chores, but their luck remained good and the welcome order arrived, transferring the party to Egypt, this time by orthodox method of transport and without adventure. Thereafter the party was absorbed into the MEF and with that force shared the vicissitudes of the desert in many months of striving against the Afrika Korps and nature in the raw; hundreds of miles backwards and forwards over the grim theatre of war, where the sun blisters by day and the night chills to an unbelievable extent; where the all pervading sand finds its way into everything. There were the flies, a myriad of pestilential creatures that made life almost unbearable at times. This was their lot in common with the gallant Eighth Army. The place names that have become almost commonplace in the world news such as Alamein, Agheila, Tobruk and Benghazi were, to these men, oft recurring milestones in a campaign of sweat and blood.
There was the continual movement of eternal packing up, striking camp and off again due to the ebb and flow of battle. They were faced with a harsh climate, a depressing country and a relentless enemy. The continual probing for soft spots and manoeuvring for flank attacks which went on unceasingly, has earned the desert credit for being the ‘tactician’s paradise’. This may sound well in journalism, but ask the troops and they will tell you the choice of noun is unfortunate.
Sometimes these sappers were under the command of larger units; at other times they were
out in small detachments on a variety of tasks that can only be listed by reference to the RE pocket book (with amendments!).
Then there were the mines, tens of thousands of them, either to be put down or taken up, to say nothing of that invention of the devil, booby traps, which had to be cleared or disarmed according to the direction of movement. Small parties had to go forward under cover of darkness and crawling through the enemy minefields, locate, lift and pass back those engines of death to the rear. They were then disarmed and, in the case of our own minefields, made safe for subsequent re-issue. The mine belts were frequently a quarter of a mile deep, protected with all kinds of tripwires and anti-lifting devices. Also they were sometimes irregularly laid which made detection difficult. They were invariably covered by both shell and machine-gun fire which would come into action at the slightest sound. The task was one for quiet stealth, iron nerves and a firm belief in your ability to beat the Hun at his own game. The result of these mine gapping parties left lanes cleared and marked for the assault through the minefield.
These lonely sapper parties carried on this task night after night, intent upon their work, for it is not the kind of occupation which encourages thoughts to wander. You only have to make one mistake, for death peers over your shoulder all the time. Every conceivable method of minelaying to prevent detection and lifting was practised by both sides and quickly mastered by the opposing forces.
The whole question of supplies to this nomadic force will probably come to be regarded as a wonder of organization but in one aspect alone, that of water supply, the task imposed upon the sappers was gargantuan. For many weary months they were employed on this struggle with nature; well-boring, pumping plants, filtration and chlorination installations. On occasions no water could be found and it had to be brought forward in four gallon tins by RASC transport. Sometimes behind our positions, at times well forward and not infrequently out in the blue; at times a rough and ready job, but at other times a highly developed engineering task of some magnitude. Two things never changed; the demand for more water and the necessity to follow the tide of mobile desert warfare. As one of the sappers remarked after many months on these tasks, ‘Just imagine if the people at home kept pulling up the ruddy water mains and relaying them’.
For one period the sappers were employed upon the construction of dummies to deceive the eye of ever watchful enemy reconnaissance aircraft, for in the desert with its high sun, heavy shadows and colourless background, camouflage means something more than just throwing a camouflage net over a vehicle. There are dummy positions, dummy vehicles and guns, in fact dummy everything at times to outwit a wily foe, all of which means a lot of preparation, hard work and organization at improvised workshops which follow the actual fighting in this arid theatre.
The highlights of this peculiar existence were those occasions when mail arrived from home, work was laid aside for a brief moment, thoughts went back to town and country in England. The all absorbing personal details of wife and children gripped the imagination and transported the reader back for a few brief moments to his normal life. The desert fades for an instant, and the surrounding mirage seems to be of streets or country lanes, even the flies are forgotten in this all too brief period of suspended animation. The silence gives place to a buzz of chatter when confidences are exchanged, a few remain silent, very silent, the unfortunate ones who did not receive a letter, when suddenly someone comes on the scene and urges forward the job in hand. Letters are put away for subsequent re-reading and the working party is back in the war on the same old tasks. The flies irritate once again and the heat blisters.
Sometimes during the unhappy days when withdrawal was imposed upon the army, they would be back at their old role of demolition. Benghazi and even Tripoli were the objectives always uppermost in their minds even in the dark days; on these occasions they felt instinctively a reluctance to destroy such facilities that existed as the whole army was convinced that ultimately they would succeed in returning westwards.
The tide of war at last turned. Attack and advance was the order of the day and the sappers of the Eighth Army took part in the spectacular and decisive victories which led up to the great advance from the Egyptian frontier through Cyrenaica, Tripoli and on to Tunisia.
Some of our men were present when Winston Churchill made his historic appearance at Tripoli. They saw the kilted pipers swing through the town to the skirl of ‘The Road to the Isles’ – (this was a favourite tune of our own band in those far-off prewar days) and in this strange setting of pageantry, thoughts not unnaturally turned to home. Others were on the roofs in the town, looking down between the palm trees on the Prime Minister of England reviewing the armoured might of the Eighth Army from a staff car and then, from the saluting base. The gunners, sappers and infantry, all swung past, spick and span with no evidence, save perhaps their tan, of the 1,000 mile trek and weeks of fighting in that memorable advance from El Alamein. The presence of our Prime Minister at this psychological moment of success acted like a tonic upon officers and men alike; never was a visit more appropriately timed. The only laugh was that twenty-four hours later, after Mr Churchill had left, the Hun put in some fierce bombing attacks. Presumably their intelligence was a day out for once!
Chapter Seventeen
AIRBORNE
It is well known that in 1940 Winston Churchill, shortly after becoming Prime Minister, ordered that we should form a corps of not less than 5,000 parachute troops. For a start No. 2 Army Commando was sent off to Chesterfield and to the small airfield at Ringway which became the Parachute School, to form a nucleus of the corps. Army Commandos were formed from volunteers from all Arms and so there were a number of sappers in No. 2 Commando. It was going to take months to build up to the Prime Minister’s target, as they were starting from scratch and, in due course, the call went out for volunteers.
In the autumn of 1941 an officer in our unit HQ volunteered with several of the soldiers and went off to join Airborne Forces. He was Captain Stephen Dorman. Before the war he had been a preparatory school master and joined the army at the outbreak of war. He had fought with an Independent Company as they were called, the forerunners of the Army Commandos, in Norway. (Dorman had joined us in Gravesend in 1940.) He was tall, very tough and deeply religious and impressed everyone immediately by his sincerity and integrity. At this time the decision was taken to form a special Airborne Sapper unit in its own right. Dorman commanded the so called Air Troop Royal Engineers and when this was expanded he became the Commander of the 1st Parachute Squadron RE. Sadly this courageous man, whom his soldiers so liked and admired, was lost on a one man patrol at night in North Africa and was never heard of again.
The Holding Company consisted of a surplus collection of officers and men over and above the ordinary Field Companies, to supply a pool of men to provide parties for ‘jobs’. They trained in the arts and crafts of sapping and mining, with a special bias towards offensive demolitions; it was a peculiar mixture of unarmed combat, coupled with skill at arms. The company contained some of the Lord Wakefield rifle team of 1939, and a number of well-known county shots, who had gone to Bisley Common to earn a dividend in those elusive prize lists, in the far off days of peace. Physically they were a tough lot, lads who could find their way about by day or night and if needs be, could live off the country.
The formation had come upon another dull patch and for some weeks had been employed upon the construction of tank traps on a particularly exposed portion of the Irish coast. It was a wind swept place with driving rain and lacked all amenities. The men worked long hours and slept in tents, when they were not blown down. Temporary cookhouses and Soyer stoves shared the same fate. For all it was a case of hard work coupled with life in the raw. In their ranks were young men who had experienced something of a Cook’s Tour along the northern seaboard of Holland, Belgium and France; small wonder then, when, with the changing fortunes of war, the character of operations changed from withdrawal to attack, orders came through for
conversion to a Parachute Squadron, RE. This was the end of the ‘Hot and Cold’ (Holding Company) but the beginning of a new chapter in their history.
In the spring, the CRE of the embryo 1st Airborne Division visited the company, inspected all ranks, looked into their record and offered a welcome to all who wished to volunteer for the winged badge of a parachutist. Some of the unit had already volunteered for Airborne Forces.
The CRE was Lieutenant Colonel Henniker, later Brigadier Sir Mark Henniker. In his autobiography An Image of War he states:
Early in 1942 2 Parachute Brigade was formed under Brigadier Down, who had formally been the CO of 1 Parachute Battalion. This Brigade needed a sapper Squadron and a new method of raising it was devised. A good Territorial Field Company in Northern Ireland was selected and ‘converted’ into 2 Parachute Squadron. Any officer or man who did not like the prospect could opt out and go to another unit. I therefore went over to Northern Ireland and had the Company assembled to tell them about it.
I took with me my driver, Driver Low, who had come from 253 Field Company. I thought, rightly as it turned out, that he would be a good recruiter. The men were assembled in a dining hall and I told them of the proposal. Following Gideon’s example I dwelt more on the hardships than the joys. I told them of the discipline required of a parachutist, and the spit and polish, the drill, the physical training, the route marches and all the things most calculated to discourage the faint hearted. The men listened in stony silence until I had finished. I then told them they could have a few days to discuss the prospects amongst themselves, but as a matter of interest I should like to see how they felt at the moment by a show of hands. Almost everyone in the room put his hand up signifying his willingness to become a parachutist. It was a wonderful spirit. In the event many men had to be rejected on medical grounds, but there remained a first class nucleus with an esprit de corps and a Territorial Army tradition second to none. The Sergeant Major was a particular character. A middle-aged man, a pre-war Territorial and far too old for the job, he asked to be allowed to stay as Company Sergeant Major when the unit was converted. With many misgivings I gave the necessary permission and the CSM came over with the others to 1st Airborne Division in Bulford. He remained with the unit until the end of the war, a most outstanding success and a tribute to his own stout heart. He was a GPO Engineer by trade. Their Officer Commanding was a tall, thin Major from the Territorial Army named Paul Baker. He overcame the teething troubles of conversion to the new role but had the misfortune to suffer a serious motor accident in North Africa before going into action.