by Shaun Clarke
‘Poor bastards,’ Taff said.
‘Move apart, you men!’ Lewes snapped. ‘You’re supposed to be marching in single file, not bunched up like Girl Guides.’
‘Sorry, boss!’ Taff responded, then fell back to where he was supposed to be – as Tail-end Charlie. He felt isolated back there, cut off by the moonlit darkness, too aware of the vastness of the desert and its lack of identifiable features. He felt minute and vulnerable.
Lewes, meanwhile, though second in the group, now marching behind Neil, was emotionally isolated by his nagging sense of failure, unable to believe that they had managed to bomb only one Axis plane. Even worse: either one of his bombs had failed to go off or the early ignition of the first one had given Jerry time to defuse the second. Either way, Lewes had little to be proud of and was feeling extremely bitter about it. He marched, then, in disconsolate isolation, blaming himself, but also gearing himself up for further research into explosives and other tactical matters when he got back to the base camp at Kabrit.
L Detachment, SAS, is now a functioning, worthy unit, he thought, but it’s not perfect yet. Making it perfect is the next job on my list. I must keep this in mind.
That his interest was returning already had to be a good sign.
They marched for six hours, but still arrived at the desert RV in darkness, just before first light. As usual, they made contact with the LRDG by using a series of whistling sounds, which both groups recognized, then by shining their torches at those shining at them. Eventually, the lorries of the LRDG took shape in the darkness and the other men, including those of the SAS, came forward to greet them.
Stirling, towering over most of the others, was the first to emerge from the darkness, holding his hand out and smiling. He shook Lewes’s hand and asked, ‘How did it go?’
‘Badly,’ Lewes replied bluntly.
He told Stirling what had happened. Stirling listened thoughtfully, then smiled even more widely and patted Lewes on the back. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of, old boy,’ he said. ‘These little mishaps are bound to happen and have to be lived with. Look at us, after all. We didn’t even get as far as the airfield.’
‘But you made up for it,’ Lewes said, ‘by attacking Jerry along that MSR.’
‘We were in the right place at the right time. That’s all there was to it. Come on, Jock, cheer up! It’s Christmas morning, after all. Also, we’ve just heard on the radio that General Ritchie’s Eighth Army marched into Benghazi yesterday. Our raids, so I’m told, had a lot to do with that – reducing the number of enemy aircraft and distracting their troops – so we’ve finally proved our worth to the sceptics. L Detachment, SAS, is now a viable entity. They won’t stop us now.’
‘Well, that’s something,’ Lewes said.
Feeling a lot happier when he climbed up into the heavily armoured, four-wheel-drive Chevrolet, behind Sergeant McGee and his driver, Corporal Cook, he was glad to take his usual seat right beside the Boyes anti-tank gun mounted in the rear and manned by Private Sammy Bakewell of the LRDG.
The rest of the men were still greeting each other, shaking hands and slapping backs, trading compliments or amiable insults, when Stirling took his place in the lorry of the LRDG commander, Captain Halliman.
‘Looks like we’re leaving straight away,’ Jimbo said, where he stood with Frankie, Taff and Neil near the lorry that was taking them back.
‘Without even breakfast,’ Taff complained.
‘You didn’t earn breakfast,’ Jimbo told him. ‘I mean, one plane for Christ’s sake!’
‘You didn’t get any,’ Neil reminded him.
‘So? At least we shot up a lot of bleedin’ Krauts and Eyeties, as well as their tanks, armoured cars and troop lorries. That’s more than you did.’
‘You bastards just struck it lucky,’ Taff insisted. ‘It’s as simple as that.’
‘Right!’ Jimbo said. ‘Begrudge us our dues. Just because you can’t face the fact that your own raid was a bloody balls-up. It’s understandable, really.’
‘One plane,’ Taff insisted, ‘is one more plane than you bastards got.’
‘Don’t come it, m’ darling!’
‘Get up on your trucks, you bloody men!’ Sergeant McGee bellowed. ‘We haven’t got all day!’
Startled, Jimbo and the others hurriedly climbed up into their lorries to a round of sardonic applause from the other men.
‘Thank you, folks,’ Jimbo said, taking a bow. ‘And now for our next act!’
Up in the leading vehicle, the LRDG commander, Captain Halliman, with Captain Stirling by his side, raised his right hand and waved it forward, indicating that the convoy should move out. The engines roared into life, the wheels churned up clouds of sand, and the lorries headed across the flat plain, towards the first gold-and-crimson tendrils of the rising sun.
Within half an hour the sun was a huge red-and-yellow ball in a whitening sky. An hour later, it was just a fierce whiteness in a sky of the same colour. The cold of night was burned away, the heat was rising rapidly, and the air was filling up with the usual buzzing flies and whining mosquitoes. These came swarming around the troopers every time the trucks stopped for their hourly checks. They got under the men’s shemaghs, into their cups of tea, and covered their uniforms and weapons. A normal day in the desert.
‘Open your mouth to drink your char and you’re going to have these bastards for breakfast,’ Jimbo said, swatting flies and mosquitoes from his cup. ‘I can take anything the desert throws at me except these bloody insects.’
‘You’ve just managed to speak without swallowing them,’ Frankie replied, ‘so they can’t be that bad.’
Frankie never bothered swatting them away; he seemed to think they were natural.
‘You’re a walking dung-heap,’ Jimbo told him. ‘That’s why they don’t bother you.’
Frankie grinned and patted Jimbo on the shoulder. ‘My old mate,’ he said.
They had stopped for one of their hourly vehicle checks when Sergeant McGee, hawk-eyed as ever, spotted a plane glinting in the sky and bawled a warning to everyone.
It was an Italian Savoya SM 79 Sparviero, a light bomber with three 12.7 Breda machine-guns and a Lewis gun, as well as over a ton of bombs. It flew directly over them, circled back, then banked and flew at them.
‘He’s attacking!’ Captain Halliman bawled.
The Italian pilot flew in low, all his guns spitting fire, stitching lines of exploding sand across the desert, running at tremendous speed towards the parked trucks. The men in the trucks returned fire with their Boyes anti-tank guns and Lewis light machine-guns, but the Savoya was already releasing its first bombs and climbing as the bullets from its guns ricocheted noisily off the lorries and wounded some screaming men.
The bombs seemed to drop slowly, turning over like black slugs, then hit the ground and exploded, one slightly behind the other. The earth erupted into two roaring mushrooms of sand, soil and smoke.
When the smoke and raining sand had thinned out, the blackened, mangled remains of an LRDG lorry was revealed. It had been blown up, set on fire, and turned upside down, with its passengers either killed by the blast, burned alive or crushed to death.
‘Bastards!’ Jimbo bawled, standing up in the rear seat of his own vehicle, beside the Boyes gun, and shaking his fist at the Savoya as it circled around in the distance, coming back to attack again. ‘Fuck you!’ he screamed, unslinging his Sten gun and preparing to fire at the oncoming plane. ‘Have a mouthful of this!’
The Boyes and Lewis guns roared again as the Savoya banked towards the column and began its second descent. The yellow flickering along its wing edges indicated that its guns were firing, then two more bombs dropped from its belly and fell like black slugs as the lines of spitting sand, kicked up by bullets, raced towards the column.
Jimbo was not alone in opening fire with his Sten gun. Most of the SAS men were on their feet, in the lorries or beside them, adding the roar of their rifles, semi-automatics and even handguns t
o that of the LRDG machine-guns.
The second pair of bombs exploded as the Savoya roared overhead, its bullets peppering more of the men and ricocheting off the lorries. The earth erupted again, one explosion following the other, to pick up two vehicles, smash them together, and throw the passengers in all directions, like rag dolls, before the lorries crashed back to the ground.
The mushrooming clouds of sand, soil and smoke briefly blotted out the sky, eventually rained back down, and drifted away on the wind, revealing more death and devastation, with charred bodies smouldering in the wreckage.
When the Savoya circled around and banked for another attack, Lewes, enraged, took charge of the pintle-mounted Lewis light machine-gun. After swinging it expertly onto what he deemed to be the proper elevation, he waited until the aircraft was virtually roaring straight at him with yellow fire spitting from its wings.
Lewes opened fire as twin lines of spitting sand raced up to his lorry, ricocheted off its bonnet, and blew the back of McGee’s head off. Perhaps Lewes saw the spewing brains, blood and bone of the sergeant’s exploded head before bullets punched through his own body like a series of red-hot rivets, throwing him violently backwards off the lorry and into the sand. After that, he saw nothing.
The two bombs from the Savoya, which roared overhead and away, exploded in front of the truck, picking it up and flipping it over, to smash back down in geysering sand that covered Lewes like a blanket.
Stirling jumped from his truck and ran back to examine Lewes. Discovering that he was dead, he shuddered helplessly with grief and shock, then managed to regain control of himself, clenching and unclenching his fists repeatedly, letting the tension flow out of him. Finally, breathing deeply and wiping some tears from his eyes, he stood up over the dead body of Captain Lewes and scanned the silvery-blue sky.
The Savoya had gone but he knew that it would return, almost certainly bringing other aircraft with it.
Possibly reading his mind, Sergeant Lorrimer said, ‘I think we should move on.’
‘Yes,’ Stirling said. ‘I agree. However, I fear we can’t take the dead with us. It’s too hot for that.’
Lorrimer snapped his fingers at a group of SAS troopers standing nearby. ‘You men,’ he said. ‘Get some shovels and bury these dead men – and be quick about it.’
‘Yes, boss!’ two of the men said simultaneously. Then they all went off to one of the trucks to get a couple of shovels. The six men were able to dig two shallow graves in a relatively short time. While they were digging, another couple of troopers wrapped the dead bodies of Captain Lewes and Sergeant McGee in tightly bound canvas sheeting. Eventually, when all was ready, the bodies were lowered into the shallow graves and covered up again. After the men had solemnly gathered around the graves, Captain Stirling, clearly trying to hide his overbrimming emotions, conducted a brief, moving ceremony, completing it with an unsteady voicing of The Lord’s Prayer.
Raising their heads after the prayer, the men saw Captain Stirling wiping another tear from his eyes before composing his features.
‘That’s it,’ he said, trying to sound gruff. ‘All right, men, let’s go.’
The men piled back onto their lorries and continued the long drive due east, towards Jalo Oasis.
Unfortunately, as anticipated by Stirling, two German Me 109F fighters appeared on the horizon to finish the work begun by the Savoya. Suddenly roaring in overhead, one after the other, they turned the desert floor into a sea of spitting sand, then tore the earth up in a series of roaring eruptions when two sticks of bombs were dropped in close succession. The bombs exploded even as the jagged lines of spitting sand raced through the column and peppered the lorries with bullets that ricocheted off into the wild blue yonder, miraculously without hitting any of the SAS or LRDG troopers, most of whom were trying to bring the departing aircraft down with their small arms. The combined noise of the exploding bombs, roaring machine-guns, and automatic and semi-automatic weapons was ear-shattering, with the men continuing to fire even after the Messerschmitts had flown off, letting the swirling, billowing sand settle down around the still-moving convoy.
The men in the trucks cheered when they saw the planes flying off. They stopped cheering when they turned around and headed back towards them.
‘They’re coming back!’ someone bawled.
A running game of hide-and-seek then began between the lorries and the aircraft and continued for the next few hours.
At times the lorries would try to race away from the planes with the LRDG gunners firing on the move; then the lorries would be called in to form a defensive laager, when the fire of the LRDG gunners would be joined by a fusillade of fire from the small arms of the defiant SAS troopers.
The tyres of one vehicle exploded, making it sink to the ground to be obscured in billowing clouds of sand. Another was peppered with bullets, was hit in its petrol tank, and exploded into flames as the last of its crew jumped to safety. Another lorry was picked up and flipped over by a bomb explosion, tipping its crew out, then finally crashing upside down, practically bouncing off the desert floor, and finally grinding to a halt in a hole created by its own weight, like a dying animal digging its own grave.
Eventually most of the lorries were damaged one way or another by the enemy aircraft, but miraculously no more men were hit and the drivers kept going.
Running out of ammunition, the Messerchmitts flew off.
They were replaced, however, forty minutes later by the original Savoya, which again caused havoc with its deadly combination of spitting machine-guns and exploding bombs.
Knowing that a defensive laager would be a sitting duck for the Savoya’s bombs, Captain Halliman ordered the other drivers to scatter as widely as possible across the desert, thus forcing the Italian pilot to choose between individual targets.
He was, in fact, coming in on a low sweep over Halliman’s lorry when six RAF Hurricane II fighters, probably en route to El Agheila, spotted him and banked to attack him. Four of them bore down upon him, one after the other, all with guns roaring, and the Savoya shuddered violently, belched out oily black smoke, lost pieces of one wing, then went into a spinning, shuddering, whining dive to the desert floor, where it exploded in a spectacular ball of vivid-yellow fire surrounded by boiling black smoke.
As the scattering Chevrolets of the LRDG came back together again, the Hurricanes flew over them, dipped their wings in salute, then flew on towards the coast, eventually disappearing beyond the horizon.
‘We all complain about the RAF,’ Lieutenant Greaves said to Jimbo, ‘but sometimes, you must admit, they’re worth waiting for.’
‘I hate to admit it,’ Jimbo replied, ‘but those bastards did warm my heart.’
Lorrimer, listening in on the conversation, just shook his head wearily.
The LRDG lorries continued on towards Jalo Oasis, though by now they were all virtual wrecks that began breaking down, one after the other. As each vehicle expired, its passengers would clamber out, strip the vehicle of anything of value – usually tyres, petrol cans and water – and distribute themselves and the spare parts as evenly as possible between the others lorries. Then the ever-diminishing convoy would trundle on across the flat, sun-scorched plain.
Gradually, however, the remaining lorries also broke down, until, by the late afternoon, there were only three left, with fifteen men on each, balanced precariously and holding on to each other in a pile of salvaged tyres, petrol cans, water bottles, and weapons. Another vehicle then broke down, leaving only two, which meant that a lot of the men had to start walking, though mercifully now in cooling darkness.
By the time the cool air had turned to rapidly chilling night wind, another lorry had broken down and the sole remaining one, sagging under the weight of its fifteen men, was squeaking in protest as it crawled on.
Stirling and Greaves, though offered a lift on the last lorry, still in the charge of Captain Halliman, decided to set a good example to their men by rejecting the offer and join
ing the others on the arduous march through the freezing night.
After four hours, they caught up with the remaining lorry, which had expired trying to climb a slight slope, beyond which lay a broad swathe of perfectly flat, hard terrain, perfect for driving. The passengers were nowhere in sight, which meant they had marched on.
‘If this was daylight,’ Lorrimer said, ‘you’d see their footsteps all the way across the desert, heading towards the horizon. They aren’t waiting for anyone.’
‘Good on ’em,’ Taff replied. ‘They’ve set a shining example.’
‘Damned right,’ Lorrimer said.
By first light, a total of forty-five men were spread out across the desert, all heading in their separate ways for Jalo Oasis. Though ragged, numb with cold, hungry and thirsty, none showed the slightest sign of wanting to give up.
‘Not now,’ Jimbo gasped. ‘Not after all this shit. I’m only going down when I’m in my grave and that’s a long way off yet … Come on, Taff, stay awake!’
‘It’s my eyes,’ Taff replied, croaking out of a ravaged throat. ‘They’re hurting so much from the sun, I can’t keep them open. It’s not tiredness – I don’t think it’s that – it’s just my eyes that are giving in.’
‘Your eyes? Shit! You’re swaying like a reed in the wind and wandering left, right and centre. You’re about to collapse, Taff.’
‘I won’t fall until you do.’
‘We all heard you making that bold statement,’ Frankie told him, ‘so now you’re going to have to live up to it.’
‘Right,’ Neil said. ‘Here, put your arm around my neck … That’s it, Taff! Now lean on me.’
‘I’m all right, I tell you … Thanks, Neil. God, I’m so bloody tired!’
‘We’re all tired,’ Jimbo said.
‘Shut your mouths, conserve your breath and keep marching,’ Lorrimer told them. ‘That way you might make it back.’
So saying, he hurried on ahead, swinging his arms as if marching to a brass band, setting a shining example. It was his way of helping them.
Thus they helped one another, supporting each other, taking turns, and so managed to get through another night and into the second day. It was worse than the day before. The heat was like a furnace. The flies and mosquitoes, smelling sweat, sensing weakness, went into a veritable frenzy around the men, attacking in swarms. The light dazzled and blinded.