Previous chapter: Sidi Barrani
February and March 1941
We moved up into Cyrenaica, crossing the border into Libya at Sollum. The Australian infantry backed by Matilda tanks of the 7th Armoured Division, later to be known as the Desert Rats, had just cleared the Italians out of Bardia, further up the coast.
The Fiat lorry, which I had picked up at the Sidi Barrani, had now become a treasured possession of 295 Coy. It could carry a load of eight or nine tons, and a lot of the company stores were transferred from the smaller trucks, making them more comfortable for the sappers, who had previously shared the load space with heavy boxes of equipment which were necessary to have, but not frequently used.
Unfortunately this truck had no batteries and therefore no lights. At this time our vehicles could travel with full lights on at night, as there was no threat from any enemy. Consequently I found myself driving at the rear of our convoy, in total darkness, up the pass at Sollum. This pass climbed a steep escarpment with sharp bends and ill-defined edges lined with rocks on one side and a sharp drop on the other. The rest of the convoy, more nimble than the Fiat, had disappeared ahead. One of the sergeants, who was riding with me, had a hand torch, which he shone on the verge as best he could and we climbed to the top arriving just as the battery in the torch failed. We were to traverse this pass again, later in the war, when we could see how tortuous it was. Just as well that we hadn’t seen it before tackling it in the dark.
The road from Weymouth to Portland, where it climbs up on to Portland Bill, is strangely similar to this road, and whenever I go there, I am reminded of Sollum.
Bardia was in two parts, the town itself, a pretty little collection of white houses perched high on a plateau with unrestricted views, and Porto Bardia, down a precipitous road to the small harbour nestled between steep cliffs, one of the few sheltered spots for coastal shipping anywhere along this coast. This was to be our home for a week or two. There were few port facilities; just a small jetty and a sandy beach about three hundred yards wide, with a cliff rising sheer at either end. These cliffs were near vertical, hundreds of feet high, and ran back away from the sea, slowly converging, until, about half a mile from the beach, they met. The whole effect was as if a giant hand had cut a slice from a large gateau of rock. The floor of the gulch on gorge was flat and sandy. The Italians, who had always had a reputation for being good road builders, had carved the road down from the plateau above from the rock. It was well surfaced and wide enough for two way traffic going up in two long climbs with a turn engineered out of the overhanging rocks.
On the floor of the gorge were two large dumps of Italian stores. One was a stack of crates of mineral water, litre bottles of Recoaro, a delicious sparkling water, which can still be purchased at the Italian delicatessen in Southampton. The other massive pile was of sacks of wheat, hundreds of tons of it.
Presumably the Italians had stocked this there to supply their troops on their way to Egypt, and had to abandon it when they retreated. It would have been easy enough to bring the stuff there on a small coaster, but not so easy to truck it up that road.
Dug into the face of the cliffs well way from the sea was a succession of caves, each with a large slab of stone as a doorstep, going back head high for about fifty feet. Floating around in the harbour were hundreds of barrels, from some sunken ship we supposed. We later discovered these to be full of Italian petrol, and a popular pastime was to take one of the rowing boats, which were lying around, and row out, tie a rope to a barrel, and tow it back for use in our own trucks.
This was the scene when we came down from the town above. The sea was a perfect blue, the sand of the beach, white, the sky unclouded and, as it was now early March, the days were hot. I still do not know quite what we were sent there to do. We spent our time scouring the country up above for enemy explosives and ammunition and bringing it down to store in the caves. We immediately discovered that these caves were home to fleas, fleas by the million and the most militant imaginable. Several of us, drawn by curiosity, walked over to one of the caves as soon as we arrived.
I saw what I thought was a brownish rock at the entrance, but found instead that the brown colour was a mass, a pulsating mass, of fleas all jumping up and down in pleasurable anticipation of a feast in store. Within seconds a wave of these insects was climbing up our legs. We were wearing khaki shorts, boots and stockings, and the sight of them pouring up onto out bare knees was unnerving to say the least. With loud yells we ran madly away to a safe distance and tore off boots and stockings and threw them into a heap, which we doused with petrol. We then set about each other, rather like monkeys at the zoo, picking fleas off until we only thought we felt them.
As the caves were wanted for storage, parties of men were detailed to ‘deflea’ them. The method was to stand at a safe distance and throw a bucket of petrol over the entrance, followed by a lighted match. When incineration of those on the doorstep was assumed to be complete, more petrol was thrown right into the cave and again lighted and so on. Luckily there was no shortage of petrol, since we had a harbour full of floating petrol barrels, and no one suffered more than a singed eyebrow as I recall.
We then brought down lorry loads of Italian mines and an assortment of other lethal explosives until we had swept the surrounding country clean. In our travels we came across a fair bit of debris from the fighting, and a lot of unused Italian stores, some useful, some eatable, and some merely curious. The eatable were quite good, some lovely evaporated milk in litre cans, nice coffee, and tinned meat, which made a change from our own variety.
Among the curiosities were some Italian tanks, scattered here and there. Examination of the first we looked at proved that the Italians must have been a lousy lot, because the interior was infested by the same insects we had found in the caves. We left them strictly alone after that.
At the landward end of our gulch, where the two cliffs met was a dump of ammunition and we amused ourselves shooting some of it off. Boxes of rifles, new and unused, and thousands of rounds to fit them gave us a good deal of harmless fun. We opened up a box of hand grenades, labelled “Bomba a Mano”. They were painted bright red, quite small and a tape about a foot long with a lead weight on the end, wound round them. The trick was to throw them in such a way that the tape unreeled in flight and activated the firing mechanism. They then went off with a spiteful little crack, but as far as we could tell, did very little harm to anyone not actually holding one at the time.
We came to the conclusion that the Italian army was not well provided for in the way of arms and equipment; most of it was shoddy and ill made. The uniforms we saw were shoddy and badly cut. Their badges and buttons were pressed out of very thin brass and simply looked tawdry. The rifles we fired had badly fitting bolts, so that when fired, smoke blew back, stinging the face and coating the cheek with a black film. After twenty rounds or so, these black deposits jammed the bolt. No wonder the soldiers were eager to surrender in such large numbers. It looked as if Mussolini had cut a lot of corners in the provisioning of his forces, making a brave show, but armed with no real power.
On the other hand, I came across a tented field hospital, which was standing in the open desert, fully equipped, and completely deserted, and strangely unlooted. Each tent was snowy white with a Red Cross prominently sewn into the fabric. The largest was equipped as a ward. The desert sand had been levelled and square ceramic tiles laid neatly over the whole floor area. The beds were normal hospital beds on wheels. Each one was made up with blankets, white sheets and pillowslips. Everything was in apple pie order, with medical equipment neatly arranged, as if waiting for staff and patients to arrive. We left it as we found it but it could not have been long before some wandering Arab took a fancy to the sheets and blankets.
This neat and antiseptic looking hospital was a far cry from the grubby, infection ridden, field hospital that I was to spend a time in after the battle of Alamein about eighteen months later.
While we were off exploring the territory and having a good time, the cooks back in the gulch had set themselves up in fine style. They had built a commodious cookhouse using timber flotsam from the beach, old tentage etc. and expanded the menu by doing barter deals with desert Arabs. We never found out where these Arabs came from, because there were none in the area which we had explored. Nonetheless, a few days after our arrival, an Arab turned up carrying some hard-boiled eggs, which he offered in exchange for tea and sugar. Soon a regular procession took to visiting, bringing not only eggs but chicken as well.
We had a cook, whose surname was Cook, generally called Cookie of course, and he was a genuine Cockney, quick to see an advantage. He set up an exchange system, using sacks of Italian wheat as his currency. Ostensibly we were guarding the wheat and the mineral water but this deterred him not at all. He had found an Italian army tractor with four-wheel drive and four wheel steering, and a sturdy trailer to go with it.
Each morning he drove across to the dump and loaded several sacks of wheat, which he brought back to the cookhouse, together with ten, or a dozen crates of the mineral water. The water supplied all our drinking requirements and tea made with it was far superior to the salt laden stuff we were getting before, which had been pumped from a local well. We also washed and shaved in the stuff, and the empty crates had a dozen uses. I can see Cookie now, filling the dixie to make tea for the unit. He didn’t waste time with a bottle opener but smashed the necks off the bottles, one in each hand and glugged them into the dixie. The only embarrassment was an over growing heap of broken bottles behind the cookhouse.
The wheat stayed on the trailer until the first customer of the day arrived. A rate of exchange had been established. One sack of wheat for one chicken, one sack of wheat for ten eggs. As you may imagine, we were soon living high on variants of chicken meals, while the eggs helped out our tinned bacon slices splendidly at breakfast time. We had encouraged the Arabs not to boil the eggs by this time. Soon men brought their wives and their donkeys to help with transport. They did not use the road down to the gulch, but instead came down some sort of goat track which zig zagged from the top of the cliff on the side of the gulch farthest away from Bardia town.
These cliffs were nearly vertical, and it was a marvel to see how an aged crone could go up and over the top whilst carrying a sack of wheat on her back. The Arab men were kind enough to help put the sack in position for the women, but then usually walked behind them, carrying nothing. One supreme egoist came down the track riding a donkey with his wife trailing behind, then having settled up for two sacks put one on the ass and one on his wife’s back, and went off up the track riding behind the sack on the donkeys back!
All this time the war was going on nicely without us, and I for one was quite content to let things stay that way. The army had taken Tobruk, and moved on up toward Benghazi. The general opinion was that when that town was taken the war in the desert would be over. It was just a question of whether we would get involved in any actual fighting. The Italian army had been utterly routed and hundreds of thousands of them made prisoner, and as far as we could see, there was just a clearing up job to be done, at which we now considered ourselves to be expert.
We need not have worried about the war ending before we got there; it was just about to come to us, for while we were snugged in at Bardia a lot of things had been happening in the great big world outside. Most directly affecting us was the news that German troops were being landed at Tripoli, commanded by some chap called Rommel, of whom, until then, we had never heard.
We also heard that half the British forces in North Africa were going to be sent to Greece, where it was thought that they would be able to deter Hitler from attacking that country.