Previous chapter: Athalassa camp, Cyprus
June to August 1942
When we arrived in Alexandria, this would have been in June 1942, we pulled up in a big transit camp called Sidi Bishr just outside Alexandria and heard the news that Tobruk had fallen, much to our disgust, and there was a great deal of ill feeling at the time between the South African troops who had escaped from there and the British troops who had been there before and knew what it was like. We felt that they had given in too quickly and as their commander was a General Klopper, we suspected him of being sympathetic to the Germans! Quite wrongly I feel sure now.
When we had sorted ourselves out a bit, we were sent off up to a place called EI Alamein, which we had never heard of before. Just a little railway halt and one building standing by the trackside with a sign, EI Alamein, and a railway which did at that time run all the way up towards Tobruk. Although I think it must have been blown up on the way back down, but it went past us to Mersa Matruh at any rate. We found ourselves mixed in with Aussie troops of the Ninth Australian Division and a great number of people from all over the world, the Greek contingent, Polish troops, New Zealanders, South Africans, a complete mixture of troops, the predominant number of course being from our own army, the British. We were quite surprised to find the desert at that point was extremely crowded when we had been used before to vast areas where you could travel nearly all day and hardly ever see anybody at all, but it was obvious that this was as far as we were going to get because the Germans had arrived and put a stop to any further travelling forwards and the Aussies were digging themselves in at the area we were posted to, which was right near the coast.
We fiddled about there for a week or so I suppose, I can’t really remember, and then we were sent back to Alexandria where we pulled into the big barracks, Mustapha Barracks in Alexandria, old pre war buildings, Egyptian style with verandas round and we found we were to stay there for a while. We also discovered pretty quickly that nearly all the barrack beds were absolutely infested with bed bugs. I couldn’t stand that idea and I managed to wangle it so that I could sleep down in the stores building where we had a lot of equipment stored and I and two other fellows took our blankets down there and slept there where at least there weren’t any bed bugs.
We soon began to realise that the reason that we were there was because the High Command was afraid Alexandria was going to be lost and that the enemy were in fact going to come down through EI Alamein, and they were taking precautions. 295 Company was there to deal with the demolition of all the harbour installations, which as you can imagine, Alexandria harbour being a big naval depot, was a pretty tricky thing to destroy. The instructions given to our sergeants, who were taken down to do reconnaissance of everything, was that on no account were they to let the local people understand what they were going to do.
The local people must have had more savvy than they gave them credit for, or already had smelt the way things were going. They were leaving Alexandria in droves on the trains that were going out of the town. Egyptian trains have got carriages on rather like the ones you see on Wild West films with a long lantern roof and a veranda at either end of the car and these train carriages were packed solid with just ordinary Arabs and their families as far as you could see and the verandas were crowded. They were riding on the buffers and the roofs because of the good handholds you could get on this roof that stuck up along the middle of the carriages, the roofs were thronged out with people. They had nearly as many people riding on the roof of the train as there were inside it and these trains were going out quite frequently. They must have taken out hundreds and thousands of these Egyptians, which didn’t cheer us up too much.
Within a few days almost it was apparent that they weren’t going to blow the place up, the Navy was going to stay there and the Germans weren’t going to get past EI Alamein unless something dreadful happened, so the flap was over. Eventually the Egyptians all came dribbling back in again but it was quite exciting while it lasted and we weren’t highly popular either. I think the Egyptians had had enough of English rule, and would not have minded a change. How they would have fared under the Germans, or more likely, the Italians was never put to the test.