November 1942
Eventually I thought, “Well why the hell do I stop here. Why don’t I just ask to be let out and go and find my unit, I know where they are, they are up the road, all I’ve got to do is go up the road until I find them.” So I asked for an interview with the ‘Old Man’ who was meant to be running this outfit. I got in to see him, told him that my unit was nearby and I knew where they probably were and how I would find them if I was let loose with some rations, and he said “Right, Sergeant Major, let him have the haversack rations and let him go.” I said “Thank you very much Sir” and off I went to the cook house, collected some rations, and walked across to where the main coast road was going by with traffic trundling along, hitched a ride on the first truck I could find and off we went, going westwards.
Eventually I arrived at a place that again had a name but there was nothing there just a large transit camp, which really meant a large collection of tents where passing drivers if on a long run could stop for “bed and breakfast” as it were. Or anyone else in transit with a genuine reason could stay there until they moved on. So we stopped, pulled in there. I went in and drew myself a blanket, which turned out to be a German army blanket, much smaller than ours so that it was impossible to get your chin and have your feet covered up at the same time. It was feet up to chest or chin down to shin, no alternative. The bed bit consisted of sleeping naturally straight on the sand. So rather an uncomfortable night sleeping on damp sand, it got really cold feeling with this skimpy looking blanket stuck over the top of me. So I resolved that I wasn’t going to stop there very long.
During the next day when we were all paraded by the Sergeant Major in charge of this camp, I discovered that there were a heck of a lot of our own chaps there. I started to talk to them, there were over forty of them, and they said, “After the battle we all got broken up, we didn’t know where the unit was and we wound up in here. It’s jolly nice here – you don’t have to do anything. You get fed three meals a day etc.” I thought that this is not right; I’m not having this. What is the outfit doing with all these fellows not there? They must be feeling the pinch a bit.
So I repeated the performance with the request to see the Commanding Officer. Sure enough I wound up in front of another Major and told him that there were forty of my fellow soldiers from 295 Company Royal Engineers in the camp and that if I was allowed to go free, I would find the unit and come back and pick them all up. I thought this would appeal to him and it did. He said “Right Sergeant Major, see that he gets what he wants and let him go.” So once more I got myself a day’s rations out of the cookhouse, got out on the road, stopped a truck and, had to ride up in the back because the cab already had people up in it, and trundled along nearly all that day looking at unit signs. Just as it was getting dark I saw our sign at the side of the road pointing off into the desert towards the sea actually as the road was about half a mile away from the sea at this point. I pounded on the cab and said “Thanks chums,” dropped off, walked down this track which led me to what we would call an oasis, a bunch of palm trees growing quite amazingly there in this desert which had not a tree in sight anywhere else.
It turned out to be the site of a well, which was being cleaned out by 295 Company Royal Engineers. Wells were important in that part of the desert because there was no other source of water unless you brought it in by truck The Germans, when retreating, had rendered this well useless by the simple process of taking the bung out of a forty gallon barrel of whale oil and dropping the barrel down into the well where the whale oil seeped out and it smelt vile and made the water completely undrinkable. The way to deal with it was to pump the water out of it first which of course distributed the oil from top to bottom of the hole as the water level sank so the oil which was on top hung onto the sandy sides of the well.
Our chaps were there busily starting from the top being lowered down into the well, digging the sides off, about three inches of sand at a time all the way round to collect all this black oil, loading it, drawing it up to the surface to get rid of it. Until they had dug the hole clean from top to bottom, the well couldn’t be used although when it was allowed to refill itself I’m convinced that the water that was in there was little more than seawater because it was only a few hundred yards away from the edge of the Mediterranean. I think that just the mere fact that it filtered through from the sea took most of the salt out. It still tasted brackish from the sea but it was water. This was the work they were engaged on. Not a job that they liked very much I can tell you.
The rest of the army of course had gone thundering off up the road and were a long way in front of us by that time. I found Jeff, my old mate, the Transport Sergeant and told him where I had come from and about these fellows at the transit camp and went straight to see Captain Wilson who, in the absence of our CO , was in charge of the Company. He, a man of few words, most of which consisted of “bloody hell” or something similar. He said “Bloody Hell. Right Sergeant Jefferies, get two trucks, take Earley with you and go down and collect them.”
By this time of course it was pitch dark so we set off way back down the road, a hell of along way to this transit camp and got there late at night. Everybody had their heads down asleep. We drove in as popular as a pork chop in a synagogue and woke the Sergeant Major up. We told him we had come to collect everybody belonging to the 295 Company RE. He went round bawling his head off, woke them all up got them all out on parade and said, “Get on those trucks, you are going back to your unit.” Well, I was as unpopular with them then believe me but I thought that this was the right thing to do. We finally got back to our unit some time in the middle of the night and I was home again and jolly pleased to be there too.
When we came back from Alexandria after the disastrous raid on Tobruk we lost all our sapper content of 2 Section leaving only the thirteen drivers and NCOs related to transport and we had to be made up to our full strength again with fifty more sappers, so we wound up with a mixture of some transferred from other sections of the Company so that we didn’t have an entirely new intake, plus quite a number that had been sent up from the base depot for reposting. As a result the drivers that were left over in 2 Section tended to cling together more than ever because we all had served right from the start of the war practically and it took a long time to get used to having a new officer and lot of new sappers around us but there it was.
It was at this time when we moved up to the Alamein area that we were put to work preparing defences for Alamein and one of these jobs consisted of digging gun pits for “twenty five pounder” artillery right forward as far as we could get on the front line as it then existed. To do this we used our Morris compressor trucks that came in really handy being able to drive them right up to the job. We were using these trucks, each one driving a pair of jackhammers, to cut into the ground, which was quite hard thereabouts, almost sandstone.
I of course got caught for a job on several occasions spending all night sitting in one of these compressor trucks running the compressor, which was up in the back driven by the main engine of the truck. The gearing to make this happen came up from just behind the driver’s seat through a series of gears, which made the most high-pitched whine imaginable. You could have heard it from miles away, I am sure, on a still night. I don’t think it took the Jerries very long to put two and two together when they could hear a compressor like that whining away and the noise of jack hammers operating as well so of course they naturally started to lay down fire from their artillery onto where they thought these things were and this livened things up a bit. Sitting in the truck hearing the compressor whine, which was really all I was listening to because if it faltered at all it was my job to get the thing cracking again, you couldn’t tell what was happening until after it had happened.
Next Chapter: Front line to Cairo and back again, several times