With the Army of the Nile now operating over thousands of square miles of territory and units here one day only to be gone the next, I knew that the field post-offices could not possibly cope with the situation, and I had been considerably worried that Daphnis might not get my first letter or hear that I was a free man again perhaps for weeks, so it comforted me a lot now to know that Teddy would be seeing her within the next few days and be able to put a definite period to the anxiety which she must be feeling on my account.
Half an hour after we had parted I was on my way to join my old friends, the New Zealanders, who had taken up their positions just outside Bardia. I found them after no little difficulty in the early hours of the morning on Friday, December the 20th.
From them I learned that the first lightning assault which had broken the Italian front had been launched by regular units of the British Army, including the battalion of the Coldstream Guards with whom I had been when captured, and first-line troops of the Indian Army. These peace-time-trained shock troops had then been withdrawn and the eager volunteers from the Dominions allowed to go in for their baptism of fire; so after their first sweep forward, during which they had chivvied the enemy in a running fight, they were mad keen to get into Bardia.
The town was now completely encircled on land, and its harbour was closed by units of the British Navy, but as the first town on the Libyan side of the border, unlike Sollum on the Egyptian side, it had been systematically prepared over a number of years to resist attack.
The white-domed mosques and spindly minarets which we could see in the far distance through our field-glasses gave no hint of the strength of the defences of the town, but every good site for miles around it had been surveyed long before the war by Italian staff officers, and pill-boxes with fields of crossfire built where they could be cunningly concealed by great mounds of sand. Further in, deep ditches had been dug as tank-traps and barbed wire had been set up in great quantities to render infantry advances difficult and hazardous.
When I arrived before the town our field guns were not even in range of it, but night and day our men gradually ate their way into the fringe of the defensive works, crawling over long stretches of sand at the imminent risk of their lives to lob Mills grenades into some strong-points, taking others by surprise in skilfully planned night attacks and causing others again to be hammered to pieces by the shells of our artillery.
Not a day passed without fresh prisoners being brought in, and it was my job to carry out their first interrogation before despatching them under guard to join the long stream of green-clad captives which was now wending its way into Egypt. Except for a few extra rounds of drinks, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve passed just like the others.
During the months before my own capture I had watched the experienced intelligence officers at Brigade and Division doing this work on the comparatively few Italians which we were able to bring in for questioning in those days. I had soon seen that some of these officers got much more out of the prisoners than others and that often much better results could be obtained by jollying the prisoner along or appearing sympathetic than by threats of rigorous confinement.
There was one regular captain that I had seen at work for whom I had the greatest admiration, and I tried to model myself on him. Using at first an entirely non-committal and colourless attitude towards each prisoner I attempted to sum him up psychologically, then I either thawed out to a state in which we eventually joked and smoked cigarettes together or, with violent blows of a short whip against a packing-case which served me as a table, I demanded answers to my questions with the same fierceness as any Prussian.
I soon discovered that to do such work well one needs to be something of an actor, and the first essential is to throw overboard any silly inhibitions about its not being done for a British officer to lose his temper or make a scene. I learned to work myself up into what appeared to be a frenzy of anger, often three or four times in a morning, and some of the wretched prisoners would cower away from me in terror, thinking that I meant to shoot them on the spot as I stood over them with my pistol levelled. But more often I yarned pleasantly for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour about his native city with each fellow who was brought in, and, luckily, I knew Italy pretty well.
These methods were certainly successful as, either from a desire not to appear oafish when spoken to decently or from blue funk that I would have them treated as they had seen the Libyan Arabs treated at the orders of their own swinish commander, Marshal Graziani, they gave away any number of little things which helped us in planning our attacks locally and also for my reports which would later assist the high-ups at Headquarters to assess the number and disposition of the forces with which the Italians had garrisoned Libya.
The days were pleasantly warm as we had the benefit of the North African sunshine which in peace-time winters thousands of fortunate people pay the tourist agencies considerable sums to obtain; but the nights were bitter. We wore every scrap of clothing we could, including our greatcoats, yet we still shivered in our bivies until we fell asleep. Many of our fellows even preferred to go on night patrols or sentry duty in order that they could keep warm by moving about during the chill hours and sleep in comfort in the daytime.
On January the 3rd the Australians delivered a great frontal attack and made a considerable breach in the outer defences. There followed two days of most desperate fighting. The Navy shelled the town; the Air Force sent any Italian machine that appeared reeling from the skies, and bombed or machine-gunned the Italians wherever they endeavoured to concentrate their land forces; while the Army, tired, covered with dust, but in magnificent heart, strafed the Italian soldiery without cessation, chasing them from ridge to ridge until at last, on Sunday, January the 5th, Bardia surrendered.
Most of the troops reckoned then that they would get at least a few days to rest and refit before they were ordered to undertake further operations, but like the splendid soldiers they are Generals Wavell and Wilson knew that the last time to rest is during those rare precious hours when it is possible to pursue a fleeing enemy. On Monday the 6th, the advance on Tobruk was ordered. On Tuesday the 7th Tobruk aerodrome was captured, and on Wednesday the 8th, only three days after the fall of Bardia, Tobruk was entirely encircled.
However, I was not among those who executed this fine forced march. The trickle of prisoners had, during the last days of the attack on Bardia, increased into a spate, and with the fall of the town we had taken a further 40,000, so I was detached from my battalion with a squad of men to help deal with them.
Although we worked night and day the herds of dejected-looking men in the wire cages were so great that the work of interrogation could only be carried out in the most perfunctory manner. All I could do, after glancing through their pay-book and private papers to pick up what I could of their peace-time background, was to pull out about one in twenty for ten minutes’ quick grilling and one in a hundred for special questioning by Intelligence at the base, owing to his Fascist connections or some other reason that made him one of the more interesting fish in our net.
During this time I had the benefit of a roof over my head, which was a great blessing in view of the coldness of the nights. The Navy had confined its bombardments of Bardia to the fortifications and harbour works, while the R.A.F. had loosed its bombs mainly upon similar objectives or troop cantonments, so the town had not sustained as much damage as we expected, and with several other officers I occupied half the house of a wealthy Arab.
His uncle had been one of the minor chieftains whom the playful Graziani had taken up in an aeroplane and flung out to be dashed to pieces on the rocks a thousand feet below, in order to induce the Arabs to accept Fascist culture, when he had been Governor-General of Libya in the days before the more clement and far-sighted Marshal Balbo took over. In consequence our host regarded the British as the liberators of his people, and he could not do enough for us; but by the 15th we had at last sorted out and despatched the best part
of the Army Corps which had been taken at Bardia, and I was ordered to rejoin my unit outside Tobruk.
It took me all day to cover the seventy miles as the one road was chock-a-block with the reinforcements and supplies with which General Wilson was strengthening our advance forces, but I was back with my old friends, the New Zealanders, on the evening of Thursday, January the 16th.
Conditions with them were much the same as they had been outside Bardia, but Tobruk appeared to be a much stiffer proposition. It had a fine deep-water harbour and, with the exception of Benghazi, which still lay over two hundred and fifty miles to the west of us, was the most important city in the whole of Eastern Libya. In addition to its strong fortifications an Italian cruiser and other warships lay in the harbour and were assisting the defence with their big guns.
Such heavies as we had been able to get up were pounding the place while our smaller calibre batteries barked and coughed at the strong points in the outer ring of the defences. All day long the aeroplanes droned overhead, some spotting for our batteries and others swooping to machine-gun columns of Italian lorries or concentrations of troops which were too far distant for us to see. It was grand to know that at least we had the mastery of the air in this campaign as on the rare occasions that Italian ’planes did put in an appearance they were always either shot down or driven off immediately. That made an immense difference, but the Italians here seemed full of fight and they had masses of ammunition. The guns roared day and night; shells whistled and screamed over, and there was hardly a moment during daylight when in one direction or another one could not see an Italian shellburst sending up a great fountain of sand.
Over the week-end we worked like niggers as orders had come through which indicated that the General Staff were now contemplating a direct assault on the city. Many batteries were moved forward almost into the fighting line, and we carried stores and ammunition up by hand during the nights to form dumps as near as we dared to the enemy.
On Tuesday, the 21st of January, the Navy, Army and Air Force attacked simultaneously at dawn. The cruiser in the harbour was shelled until it became a burnt-out skeleton. Five of the perimeter forts were taken, and in several places our troops penetrated the inner defences of the city. On Wednesday the 22nd, the flag on the Italian G.H.Q. was hauled down and Tobruk surrendered with a further 25,000 prisoners.
Once more my friends, overjoyed as they were by their victory, thought that the maximum possible profit had now been reaped from our offensive, and that we should have to sit down to consolidate our gains; but our General Staff in the Middle East seemed to have taken a leaf out of the Germans’ book and grasped the great lesson made so tragically apparent in the battles for Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. Defence was no longer superior to attack, except in quite exceptional circumstances and, given speed and imagination, there appeared to be no limit to the gains which might be secured by a victorious army providing that it was properly directed, and that the men composing it were prepared to march and fight until they dropped.
Within an hour of the fall of Tobruk General Sir Henry Maitland Wilson was calling upon his army for new efforts, and he did not call in vain. It was now just on seven weeks since the first assault had been delivered against Sidi Barrani, and during that time there had been no days off for anyone and barely even the time to keep ourselves and our arms reasonably clean. Few of us had a bath and sometimes we were unable even to wash for days at a stretch, but there were no grumblers. Home Forces, Australians, New Zealanders and Indians alike were all so elated by the smashing blows we were dealing the enemy that fatigue, dirt and discomfort were forgotten. All they asked was to be led on to further triumphs.
Once again I was left behind at Tobruk to help cope with the new flood of prisoners so I was one of the few lucky ones who was able to live for some days in a comfortable house where I could actually take my clothes off to sleep in bed each night and get a bath each morning.
By the Sunday following the fall of Tobruk our men were fighting in the neighbourhood of Derna, which was as far again along the coast as Tobruk had been from the frontier. This was much the most spectacular advance that had so far been made during any four days in this remarkable campaign, but it was to be far exceeded before the full triumph was completed.
A week after the capture of Tobruk, the bulk of the prisoners there having been dealt with, I was again ordered to rejoin my battalion, but by the time I reached Derna I found that this fine town, which the Italians had converted in recent years into a fashionable pleasure resort, had already fallen. That was on January the 30th, and it now seemed that the Italians’ Libyan Army was cracking up in all directions. From February the 1st onwards it was one wild, tireless drive by tanks, Bren-gun carriers, armoured cars and lorries to catch up with the fleeing Italians.
I had lost all trace of my battalion, so I simply went on into the blue, picking up lifts as I could and snatching an hour or two’s sleep whenever I felt too utterly worn out to go any further. Except for sandy stretches here and there, we were now mostly free of the desert, having passed into the pleasant fertile region of Western Cyrenaica, where there were grazing herds, fields of crops and groves of date palms.
At every village through which we passed the little groups of Arabs never seemed tired of cheering and thrusting presents of fruit and sticky sweetmeats upon us. We rarely saw an Italian except for strays and small detachments who wished to give themselves up, but for the time being we were too occupied in pressing on without wasting a single moment to bother with them. On February the 3rd the old town of Cyrene, which in Roman times had been the capital of the province, was taken, and three days later there was a great tank battle in which Major-General Martel, having raced right across the inland desert almost to the bottom of the Gulf of Sirte, cut off and smashed the retreating Italians. That night, Thursday, February the 6th, Benghazi surrendered, and the whole of Cyrenaica was in British hands.
From start to finish it had been a magnificent feat of endurance on the part of the troops and a supremely brilliant demonstration by our General Staff of the art of waging war. Only too often in the Boer War, and in the 1914-18 War, our generals had received completely unmerited praise, titles and high decorations for flinging their troops against positions held strongly by an enemy or standing to fight a desperate battle in the most adverse circumstances. It does not need forty years of specialised training, staff courses and experience in command to order men to attack—or fight with their backs to the wall. Any fool can fling troops against a hill or require them to stand and die when he has made a mucker of his job; but it needs real brains, imagination and enormous organising ability to direct the spearheads of a small force with maximum striking power against the weak spots of a vastly superior enemy, and to do it again and again until his whole army is broken up in confusion and his strong places destroyed. That was what our generals had done; with a force of little more than sixty thousand men they had utterly routed an army a quarter of a million strong and overrun a territory nearly as big as England. We were immensely proud of them and not without pride in ourselves to think that, with our sweat and drive, we had been among those who had contributed to re-establishing the prestige that the British Army had lost in Norway, France and Belgium.
During those exhausting days of questioning prisoners for hour after hour, writing reports for despatch-riders to rush off to Intelligence, and thrusting forward day after day, across territory which a few weeks previously we had never dreamed that we’d be able to reach, I had little time to be anxious, as I otherwise should have been, about Daphnis.
After leaving Fort Capuzzo I had made up my mind that I must not expect to hear from her. In an open warfare offensive of this kind it is utterly impossible for the Army postal service to keep in touch with constantly moving units and sometimes mails get hung up for weeks before, at last, reaching their destination; but actually I fared much better than I expected, as I got a first letter from her while we were still outside
Bardia.
In it she told me how utterly shattered she had been when she had learnt that I had been taken prisoner, and of how all her old fears about the prophecy that a sword lay between us and that we were fated never to belong to each other had possessed her mind to the exclusion of all else until her parents had feared that she was going to have a breakdown. Then how Teddy Bannister had arrived one morning and seen her mother, after which they had broken the news to her that I was alive and free.
While I was in Bardia itself I had two more letters from her, all glowing with love and confidence in our future happiness. After that there was an interval of over a fortnight, at the end of which five letters turned up in one bag of mail that reached us at Tobruk. From that point on the postal people lost me, and I certainly can’t blame them, as I never slept in the same place twice until I arrived in Benghazi two days after its capture.
All through those weeks I wrote to her, when, how and where I could in ink or pencil, and when I had run out of ordinary paper, on the backs of Army forms or anything I could get hold of. Only once did more than three days elapse without my being able to get a few lines off to let her know that I was still alive, well and unwounded, and whenever I could keep myself awake to do so I scribbled long screeds of adoration.
On my second day in Benghazi the mails caught up, and I received another batch of letters from Daphnis. As I read them through, my fingers trembled so that I could hardly hold the sheets. Every line of them radiated a love that rivalled my own, and I knew, now that a halt had at last been called to our victorious progress, I should be able to get leave and be with her very soon again.
We were once more dealing with prisoners as hard as we could go, and thousands of them had been concentrated in great wire cages just outside the town, near one of which I occupied a hutment. But on the morning of the 11th I chucked work, collared one of the innumerable little Fiat cars that we had captured, and drove over to the New Zealanders.
The Sword of Fate Page 18