A Lancashire lad Goes to War : Chapter 5

WE SWING SOUTH

The whole Front had been halted by these storms, but familiar noises returned as we were ordered forward to El Darba, where we set up our base again. I think we stayed there for about a week, and then moved forward again past Mersa Matruh to Bardia. By now, water was rationed as the wagon lines were a long distance behind us and the water truck came once a week to fill our cans. If there was any water in the truck after we had filled our cans, the rest was shared out between us, to wash ourselves and our clothes (usually one litre per person). After we had finished, the remaining water looked like brown mud.

Each truck was allocated its own rations of food and water. To boil the water, we used a 'Benghazi' - a flimsy 5-gallon petrol tin cut in half, with wire handles, half-filled with sand. A small amount of petrol was poured on to the sand and set alight. The water was put into a 5-lb jam tin and set on to the 'Benghazi'; when it boiled; a couple of spoons of tea were added. The tealeaves were not thrown away, but used again with a few fresh leaves. Once all of the cooking had been done, the sand was emptied from the 'Benghazi', the brew tin was put inside it and it was hung from the towing hook of the truck.

As water was always in such short supply, we were not able to wash out our Dixie’s (mess tins) and mugs after using them. The alternative technique was to scoop up some sand in the Dixie and mug and rub it around to remove the food stuck to the container, empty the sand and repeat until they were clean. Then I got an old piece of cloth (we used the army towels which were made of thin, smooth cotton) so that I could wipe out the utensils. I kept this cloth especially for this purpose, but it was rather smelly after a while as it never got washed.

Somewhere just before Tobruk, Captain Kemsley was posted away and Captain Lewsey took over. I had met him when I was in the 2nd Survey Regiment and he was a Second Lieutenant. He greeted Roy Rix and I like long-lost brothers (as we were the only people there that he knew, and this was to be his first time under fire). All the water was now salty, and this caused the milk added to our tea to separate out into globules, so we had to start drinking tea without milk. Even though the biscuits were in sealed metal tins, they had live weevils in them. The technique for dealing with them was to break each biscuit into 4 pieces, and then knock the pieces on the side of the truck, hopefully knocking the weevils out. It was then necessary to close one's eyes and hope for the best, but we soon became used to these additions to our diet. Occasionally we were given a tin of bacon, which consisted of cooked bacon bits rolled up on greaseproof paper and then slid into a tin and sealed. We would take the top off the tin, put a small amount of water in our Dixie’s, put the tin in the Dixie and heat it up. It looked disgusting particularly as there was more fat than bacon, but we drew the greaseproof paper slowly out of the tin, leaving behind the fat. Although revolting by today's standards, it made a pleasant change from bully beef. The fat was saved until we had obtained some flour when we made flapjacks and bully beef fritters. Flapjacks were really like dough made with water and flour and fried in the bacon fat, and the fritters were slices of corn beef wrapped in this flapjack dough and also fried in the fat. We sometimes had a 2-lb tin which was marked as cheese, which was cream-coloured but didn’t taste like cheese at all. Goodness knows what it was made of as it was really hard “cheese” which never melted in the heat of the desert. We also had tins of Olio which was a type of margarine specially treated so that also didn’t melt in the desert heat either. Trying to spread that on hard-tack biscuits was very difficult so we had to just cut a thin slice of margarine and lay it on the biscuit. How I teeth survived, I often wondered!

At one point we stopped a couple of miles south of the coast road where the terrain was very flat but sloping slightly to the south. There was no vegetation as the ground was solid limestone, covered in places with very fine sand that rose into the air with a slight breeze or just through people walking. Consequently, everything was soon covered with a fine layer of sand - after about 5 minutes even a mug of tea had a layer on top. The ground was too hard to dig in so we worked from the back of a 3-ton truck and a thick, black square tent from which light could not escape at night.

One afternoon I was manning the radios in one of the trucks when a shell landed about thirty feet away. A piece about the length and twice the thickness of a ballpoint pen hit and stuck in the outer case of a radio, drawing my attention to the close danger. The Germans were usually so methodical with their shelling as they kept to the same routine every day. If they sent two shells over to us at six o’clock in the morning, they sent them over every day at the same time and the same amount. However on this day unusually, they sent two or three shells over at less than half a mile of each other and at odd times of the day. I think that there was no one sighting the guns. On another day they sent the usual three shells, which landed about 50 yards away where Doug Blackburn - one of our drivers - happened to be walking. As I watched, he came running out of the dust and smoke, head thrown back and both hands clutching his bottom with a long thin piece of shrapnel sticking out of the fleshy part. It was like watching a cartoon! Our medical officer pulled it out so that he did not need to go to hospital.

We moved forward again towards Tobruk, but before reaching the port we were ordered due south past Sidi Rezegh to “Knightsbridge”. I was amazed to see to see two forty gallon oil drums stood one on top of the other with “Knightsbridge” painted round them it, so that anyone who passed this way would know that this had been the site of one of the heaviest tank battles when the troops retreated back to El Alamein. Everyone just referred to this battle as “Knightsbridge”. There were dozens of trucks and tanks, both English and German, damaged and burnt out. Some of the trucks still held the bodies of their drivers and mates sitting in their seats. Their hair had grown over the months since they had been killed, and this sight made me feel sickly. We continued moving south. The desert was now very flat, enabling us to move in V-shaped desert formation with our captain at the point (of the V) leading the way in case we were spotted by enemy aircraft.

We travelled for about five days, but it was slow going; there were no tracks, and part of the route was now very rocky. This meant that we had to go very slowly to avoid breaking the axles, whilst on the sand we could not move too fast lest we create a dust cloud, which would have given away our position. One day when we were still travelling south, we drove up a fairly steep incline.

When we reached the top of the escarpment we could not believe our eyes - there was a green valley stretching away; we could hear running water, and there were some animals a bit bigger than a rabbit running away. It was late November, and for about two months all we had seen was yellow and grey sand and rocks, with bits of grey scrub dotted around, so that sight really did take our breath away. However, it was short-lived, as we drove along the top of the valley and then turned west.

Sometime during the next day or two, about half a mile to the north of us we passed an amphitheatre very similar to the Coliseum in Rome, but it looked very forlorn on its own. We could see no other buildings, but our skipper would not let us investigate.

A few miles further on, as were coming towards the end of daylight, we came upon a fortified house, completely empty and in very good condition. The courtyard and stables took all of our eleven trucks. I sat in the front of our truck while all the drivers filled their tanks with petrol, and then someone spilt some petrol and the stove cooking our dinner ignited it. I grabbed the extinguisher from the trunk and sprayed the area with carbon tetrachloride - I have never seen a fire go out so quickly. This was fortunate: the fire would have revealed our position as it was now getting quite dark.

Around this time, I was promoted to Group A Second Class Surveyor RA which increased my pay by about 6d a day. Of course we did not receive any pay in the desert, as there was nothing to buy. The money was saved for us in England.

We set off again at dawn, heading due west. I cannot remember how long we travelled before we headed north, but we passed west of Agedabia and stopped about 12 miles short of the coast road. We were in contact by radio once a day with our troop or battery headquarters. Our co-ordinates were given over the air, and the return message told us that we were about 9 miles behind the German lines. There was nothing we could do about this, and we did not know whose idea it had been to send us to this position, so we separated out along a wadi.

On our second day in this position, two armoured cars arrived to give us protection. We did not ask where they had come from, but we were glad that they were there. The Germans withdrew along the coast road, and fortunately they missed us by a couple of miles. The water truck came out to us, so we could replenish our depleted stock. We had not been able to wash or shave for 10 days, so had all grown a moustache and chin stubble, but we were finally able to clean ourselves. I kept my 'tash' and it curled at the ends nicely for a little over 12 months.

We now set up base near El Agheila, and were back in the battle line. We had enjoyed a quiet period of 10 days, but once again the enemy guns and aircraft were using us as targets and life again became hectic. When in a static position, the position would be shelled at the same time each day until the battle line moved. Everyone therefore knew that at those times every day the position would come under fire and would be prepared for it.

Around 20 December 1942, the German lines moved out of range, so we packed our equipment and waited for orders. A couple of days later, two of our men set off for the coast and returned on Christmas Eve with a lump of pork, some stuffing and several tins of new potatoes. They had bought them from a cook on one of the naval boats. The Army sent a bottle of beer to everyone in the desert. We now had one of the headquarters' cooks with us, and he made a very good job of Christmas dinner; it was a treat to have fresh food, and we had a sing-song session afterwards.

One of the carols started by Captain Lewsey was 'Good King Wenceslas' - I was the only one to know all the words to the end, so he used his booming voice as the King and I took the Page.

When on active service all personnel were allowed 50 cigarettes per week; in the 8th Army, ours were 'V's made by Godfrey Philips in India, and the consensus was that a large amount of camel dung was incorporated into the tobacco - they were vile! I used them to barter with the Arabs for eggs or beans, as there were patches of desert about 30 yards square growing a crop similar to broad beans. The Arabs lived in black tents, and since the war did not concern them they ignored it and carried on as usual. They were very courteous. I had learned how to address an Arab (involving many hand movements) while in Cairo. Several times I sat just inside the test, cross-legged, and drank their very sweet black tea as we made a deal, which was quite an enjoyable experience.

On 27 December I had a restless night and woke with a headache. I wanted nothing to eat and only drank for the rest of the day while I continued to feel rough. When I got up the following morning and passed water, it was the colour of beer and my stomach was canary yellow. I knew then that I had yellow jaundice, so I reported sick. I was told to pack my things and report to the Red Cross collecting point, about half a mile north of us. I was too weak to carry my belongings, so Roy Rix carried them for me and saw me on to an ambulance. The ambulance went west along the coast road and through the 'Marble Arch', - a big white archway astride the road at the border of Tripolitania. Just beyond the arch was a landing strip where I boarded a Douglas Dakota. As I climbed the boarding ladder, I saw a huge brown cloud off to the west. I was the only passenger and the pilot was in a hurry to take-off before the sandstorm arrived.

We took off and flew low with fighter cover to Tobruk. I had just settled down into a bell tent when the sandstorm arrived. There were about six of us in the tent and we had to keep going out and repeatedly hammer the pegs in the sand during the night to stop the tent from being blown away. To breathe in a wind blowing at about 60 miles per hour with stinging sand, it was necessary to tie a large piece of cloth across the nose and mouth. Most of us used large handkerchiefs which we had bought in Cairo for the purpose of protecting our necks from the sun as this was the most vulnerable part of the body and if not protected could give you sunstroke (lots of tips like that were passed around by word of mouth from the experienced soldiers to the “pinkies” ).

When dawn came, the wind dropped and everything was calm again. We were bussed to a Red Cross train that took us to base hospital somewhere in the Nile River delta. The journey took about 24 hours, and I finished up at either the 103rd or 105th South African Hospital somewhere between Ismailia and Cairo. It was tented. The doctor came and saw us a short time after we had been allocated beds. A nice chatty bloke, he had a good prod around my stomach. He pressed and released my stomach, saying "beautiful canary colour!" as my stomach went white and back to deep yellow. I had a lot of pain at the back of my throat and down my windpipe; he had a look at my throat and said "Oh! It's only heartburn”. The nurse gave me some bismuth and opium which certainly did ease my pain.

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