August and September 1942
We fully expected that when this emergency had subsided we would be sent back up the desert. In fact 295 Company with the exception of No 2 section, that was the one I was in, were sent back up there. We stayed at Mustapha Barracks and were told we were going to do some training exercises. It was a very peculiar affair because nobody knew what was going to happen, and into the barracks came some Royal Fusiliers, about a couple of hundred of them, some Artillery men, another fifty or sixty I suppose and various other odds and ends. This didn’t seem to make a great deal of sense to us. We noticed that the Artillery were over one side of the barrack square practising on a lot of anti-aircraft guns that were assembled. They were mostly the little captured Italian Breda guns which were more or less like our Bofors but were not quite so effective. They had the ammunition and were firing these damn things off, learning how to load and unload and aim and it was very clear to us then that somebody was going to make a raid somewhere and were going to land on territory occupied by Italians if nothing else.
Then the harbour suddenly received seventy motor torpedo boats of the Royal Navy and a lot of our chaps were detailed off every night to go down to the harbour, get on these MTBs and go outside the harbour boom into the open sea, cruise around for a few hours and come back again, all in the dark at night. This was supposed to be highly secret. Well of course any Arab that had any sense in his head could see very well what we were doing even if he didn’t know why we were doing it. In fact the barrack itself was full of civilian workers who had full access to the vision and sight of everything even if they didn’t understand what we were talking about. I expect some of them did but this went on for quite some time and the drivers, of whom I was one of course, had nothing much to do.
Then the powers that be said “Right driver Frear”, my mate Eric, “we want you to take your truck up to Haifa loaded with a platoon of Royal Engineers,” and they disappeared, driving up to Haifa in Palestine. Then Curly Browning and myself were detailed off to take another bunch of fellows down to Cairo where they were going to join the Long Range Desert Group. Well, this really excited us, because we thought “what the devil’s going on?” We went off down to Cairo, Curly and I, in these 30 cwt Chevvies that we had had for quite a while now and liked very much, American Chevs. When we got there both Curly and I felt that we didn’t want to be parted from all our mates and so we went to our officer and asked if we could volunteer to go on what ever expedition they were going on and could use our trucks as well because they were in perfectly good condition and well capable of doing anything that anybody wanted to do with them. He went off and had a word with the man in charge of the operation but came back and said “well I’m sorry, your vehicles are American Chevs and they are using Canadian Chevs which have different tyre sizes, different spare parts, they just wouldn’t mix in, you would be more of a nuisance than a help. If anything went wrong with your vehicles we would have to abandon them, so we are sorry, thanks very much for offering but you are not needed.”
So, with our tails down we drove the empty trucks back up to Alexandria and settled back down to a life of almost idleness on our part because they had no work for us to do. Meanwhile the rest of the No 2 section that were left were religiously going through this MTB training every night. Presumably it was to get them used to the motion of these things and to get them over seasickness. It came to the day when all of a sudden they were told when they were going. “This is for real, get your gear up together and get on those trucks and get on down the docks”.
Sergeant Woods, one of my favourites, came running up to me and said “Wally we’re off. We are going to Tobruk. Shan’t come back again.” I knew exactly what he meant. I thought, “Oh my God, what the hell are they going to Tobruk for”, and off they went. Now this was the first time that anybody outside knew about this raid on Tobruk officially but there must have been plenty of spies in and around the barracks at Alexandria and I think the Germans knew precisely what was happening so that when the affair started they were sat there waiting for them.
Tobruk harbour is pear shaped and the neck or the stalk of the pear would be the entrance so it’s a place that is a lot easier to get into than it is to get out again.
The idea was that there was going to be a large raiding party. The bulk of the people being the Royal Marines who were coming from Haifa in Palestine. There were about two thousand of them as I remember and they were to sail into the harbour and land. I don’t know whether it was on a cruiser or not, but that was the crowd including our Royal Engineers, who had been taken up there to go with them. There was the overland outfit from the, Long Range Desert Group plus a couple of truck loads of our chaps and finally this crazy business with the MTBs where the Royal Navy was going to sail Motor Torpedo Boats all the way from Alexandria harbour to Tobruk. I don’t know how far it is [about 400 miles] but it’s a heck of a long way by road, not quite so far by sea I don’t suppose but it was way beyond their range of endurance or their fuel supply, so they were loaded with forty gallon barrels of aviation fuel lashed on the decks in order to give them enough fuel to get back again. They had to have aviation fuel because they were Packard engines in these boats and they ran on that, like an aircraft engine I suppose. Of course this made them a sitting duck if they got hit.
We didn’t know anything of this, being the drivers left behind. We pieced it all together afterwards from what we learnt and the fact was that out of our section, the REs, which must have been around fifty, about a quarter of the total complement of 295 company. If you took the drivers out, that left about fifty sappers and not one single one of them came back again. After the war we found that quite a few of them had been taken prisoner but also a lot of them had died in this raid mostly drowned at sea or died of thirst while drifting in these empty MTBs afterwards. It was an absolute fiasco and a disaster. The two destroyers, the Sikh and the Zulu accompanying the cruiser were both lost. One of the destroyers was hit and the other one went in to tow it out across the harbour entrance when a lucky shell cut the tow rope and left her adrift again and then the Luftwaffe came along and sank the pair of them with Stuka dive bombers.
I don’t know how many of the MTBs ever got back to Alex but loads of them didn’t make it and quite a few of our chaps, we found out, had been picked up at sea by the navy or washed ashore along the coastline of Egypt including Sergeant Woods, the man I spoke to last, Corporal Berryman, another fine fellow, Our cook even, Cooky Cook, who had been detailed to go, much to his absolute horror. He was a cook and he never went on anything much. He wasn’t a member of the A.C.C, the Army Catering Corps that had been formed since we went out to Egypt, so he was still a Royal Engineer although he always worked in the cookhouse. But apparently he had a bit of a fracas with the sergeant a few days before the raid and he said “Right, you’re coming on the raid then in that case” and he was dead as well. He drowned and all in all it was an awful thing.
We chaps were just left there sitting on our bottoms in Alexandria with nothing to do waiting in case they did come back. We were there for a fortnight and never saw a soul and didn’t know what to do with ourselves. We finally got orders to drive back up and join our unit, up near Alamein where our numbers were made up by reinforcements posted up from the base depot. We reluctantly became members of a new Section of whom we knew no one apart from ourselves, that’s ten or a dozen drivers.
I remember how we were devastated because all these other fellows had come out from England with us and been buddies and pals for two years and there they all suddenly disappeared just like that. It was an awful time I remember, and God knows nothing ever came of the raid. It was the craziest thing ever attempted and Montgomery, when he came out, would never have dreamed of doing such a thing, but some twits down in the HQ at Cairo thought that it was a brilliant idea to go in and give the Germans a surprise. Instead of that, those few people that we did hear anything from, some of the Royal Fusiliers, who got back, we talked to them, and they said these MTBs were going round the harbour and being hit with eighty eight millimetre shells from the anti aircraft guns posted all round the harbour and those eighty eights were deadly and of course every time they hit an MTB all the fuel went up and the few that got out never made it back anywhere.
I don’t think anybody got back to Alexandria at all. It was terrible.
Note
The raid on Tobruk, codename Operation Agreement, took place on 13/14 September 1942. In the raid, over 800 men were killed and 576 captured. The Royal Navy lost three ships and several MTBs.
25 men from 295 Field Company Royal Engineers were killed including:
Lance Serjeant Frederick Alfred Woods (aged 23)
Corporal Frederick Walter Berryman (aged 23)
Sapper John Jellicoe Cook (aged 26)
All are commemorated on The Alamein Memorial.