May 1941 to late 1941
We had a short spell at a place called Bagoush [30 miles east of Mersa Matruh], sleeping in deep dugouts that some one else had excavated. With no transport and nothing much to do, it was rather boring. Having nothing to do sounds good, but there has never been a Sergeant Major who is happy about it. He spends his time devising cunning ways of trapping those soldiers, unwary enough to attract his attention, into some misdemeanour, real or imaginary, and finding unpleasant tasks for them to do.
This state of affairs ended when it was announced that we were to be given a week’s leave in Cairo. Lists were prepared, and my name was in the first batch with several of my mates. Great excitement! We had very little money. Paydays were few and far between, but we managed to draw a little, with the promise that we could draw more from the paymaster in Cairo.
A railway ran from Matruk down to Cairo via Alexandria and we rattled off in high spirits, arriving in Cairo in the evening. We checked in at Abbassia Barracks, to be told that a signal had been received ordering our immediate return to Bagoush. You should have heard the language! All we saw of the fleshpots of Cairo was a meal of egg and chips, (all we could afford) before turning in on the barrack room floor, ready for any early start in the morning.
When we got back to the unit, the Sergeant Major merely said “Oh, glad to see you back, get your kit packed. We’re off to Port Said.” Next morning we retraced our steps back to the Suez Canal and Port Said. There, the good ship “King Fuad II” awaited and we embarked to sail to Cyprus. This ship in happier days had plied around the Eastern Mediterranean calling at various ports in Palestine and Syria as well as Cyprus. She belonged to the Khedivial Mail line and was crewed by Egyptians.
Facilities on board were not good. We had hot tea, but the food was the usual hard tack. In this case our main meal was one can of fish per man. I thought my tin looked a little the worse for wear, but it was that or nothing. The rest of the voyage is a blur, because I had a violent attack of “Gyppy Tummy” and lost interest in everything else until we drew in to the harbour at Famagusta. We had barely tied up before some German bombers, Heinkels I think, started dropping bombs. They flew very low over the ramparts of the old town, knowing – one must suppose – that there were no anti aircraft guns to worry about. When the dust had settled it seemed that little damage had been done, and we disembarked.
We had brought nothing with us, but some vehicles were waiting on the dockside to take us to Nicosia. Two of these were builder’s dumpers, and I found myself driving one of them erratically out of the town. Erratically because the vehicle was based on a Fordson tractor, with a tipping body over the axle with the large wheels, and the engine and driver sitting over the smaller, steerable wheels, but looking forward over the huge body. This was a bit like steering a fairground dodgem and called for a fair bit of concentration. By the time the two of us had covered the forty-mile to Nicosia, we had just about mastered the art, and remembered to drive on the left, after getting used to North Africa where one drove on the right.
Our arrival in Cyprus appeared to take everyone by surprise. After a day or two at Worseley barracks in Nicosia we moved to Larnaca on the coast, where we were billeted in civilian houses, some empty, some with the owners still resident. We had no means of cooking and at each mealtime, trays of food were brought in from nearby restaurants. This resulted in some interesting menus. Very little of it was to our taste. Here we first made acquaintance with sweet potatoes. When boiled they were tolerable, but when served as chips with fried eggs, they were particularly nauseating. We also objected to the supply of green grapes as our pudding. The practice was to place a large wicker basket filled with grapes, at the door of each billet, from which we were to help ourselves. I suppose the local restaurateurs were making hay, knowing that the situation could not last. And it did not.
After a while we were moved again to a camp near Nicosia. Here we had our own cooks in their own cookhouse, dishing up the same old rations that we used to dislike so much in the desert, but which now took on a more palatable appearance.
We were now living in small tents in a stubbly cornfield about a quarter of a mile from the airfield, now Nicosia International Airport, but then just one long strip with a few huts and a control tower. The airfield was being used by Blenheim bombers and Fairey Swordfish torpedo bombers. The facilities were nearly non-existent. The fuel dump was just an area off the side of the runway where hundreds of barrels of aviation fuel were stored in the open and the bomb dump was on some rocky ground at the end of the strip, where the land fell away in a small cliff about fifty feet down from the strip above. Here some hundreds of aircraft bombs of different sizes were lying about on the ground.
Our job was to make these dumps less vulnerable from the air, by digging trenches to stow them in. We were also to build “sangars”. These were enclosures built of stone and soil in which the aircraft could be shielded from flying shrapnel in the event of a bombing attack. Many hundreds of Cypriot workers, with their own carts drawn by mules or donkeys were employed to bring in the material used in these sangars and they also did most of the building work.
We had been issued with a few lorries, a mixed lot of Morris, Austin and Bedford. These had all done a lot of work before they came to us, which kept the mechanics busy. The tactical situation was that the Germans had just recently captured the island of Crete after landing paratroops in large numbers. We had evacuated what troops we could, with heavy losses to the Royal Navy and the nearest friendly base was now Alexandria and, of lesser importance, Haifa in Palestine.
Apart from the Germans on Crete, the enemy consisted of the Italian air force and navy, with units on the island of Rhodes. In Syria and the Lebanon, not many miles away was the French Vichy army and air force who were hostile, although about to be set upon by a force of British units from Egypt, mostly Australian infantry.
Among the higher ups, the great worry must have been that an attack might be made on Cyprus similar to that on Crete. The defences of Cyprus consisted as far as could be seem, of the few bombers at Nicosia, no fighter aircraft at all, no big naval force, and but one battalion of infantry, The Sherwood Foresters plus a few “hangers on” such as ourselves.
All this must have been very well known to the Italians, if not to the Germans. One morning at about ten a flight of Italian Savoia bombers arrived. They flew a straight and undeviating course at a height where the AA guns could not hit them and dropped their bomb load right on the petrol dump. We had not yet got on the airfield and we had a grandstand view. The whole acre or so of petrol barrels went up in one great gout of flame. The aircraft droned away. The pilots no doubt enjoyed their lunch back at the airfield on Rhodes. There being no petrol left to conceal, we now concentrated on the bomb dump. The ground below the cliff was hard and rocky and we had a large Ingersoll Rand compressor and some jackhammers. Even so it was obvious that it would take a long time to dig any worthwhile trenches. Instead it was decided that we should build sandbag walls to protect the bombs from anything but a direct hit.
The first sandbag wall we built was for ourselves, and just as well too. The next morning our Italian friends came back again, nine of them, in a nice V formation, flying in a clear blue sky: We knew what was likely to happen and we all piled in between the sandbags. I remember wishing that I had been a bit quicker and got there first. I could then have been one of those at the bottom of the heap. As it was several of us just landed on top of those already there and wished we weren’t so exposed. We could hear the bombs whistling down and cringed as much as it is possible to cringe when already laying flat.
The Italians did not seem to be so well informed about the location of these RAF bombs, for they dropped their load on the runway, but the damage they did was tremendous. When we got there the scene was horrific. Some of the Greek civilian workers, when they heard the sound of the bombers crowded in to one of the partly built sangars, and that was exactly where a bomb landed. The area was littered with debris, and dead and dying donkeys added to the horror.
Many of the aircraft were badly damaged by blast. One Swordfish had been standing in the open, loaded with its torpedo, which weighed about one and a half tons. The blast blew the undercarriage clean off the aircraft – or vice versa – and it belly flopped on to its own torpedo. Only a few planes inside the completed sangars escaped damage. The runway was peppered with bomb holes, which we spent the next few days in filling in.
This was enough. Now that all the damage was done three fighters – Hurricanes I think- came over from somewhere. The next morning when the bombers were on their way for another go they shot down three of them. We never saw the rest of them again, or the fighters for that matter.
The next piece of excitement came a few days after. We were standing on the runway and saw a large plane with Air Force markings coming in as if to land. It did not land, but instead dropped a small bomb on the runway, loosed off a few rounds from a machine gun, which did no harm, and then opened the throttles and soared off in the direction from which it had come.
The markings we saw were roundels of the French Air Force, red white and blue, but in a different order to our markings. The plane was a product of Boulton and Paul, a British firm and identical to some in the RAF. The cheeky devils who were flying it were some of the Vichy French making a last defiant gesture before packing it in over in Syria.
You may think that in Cyprus life for us was all hard work and danger. Not so. We were very near to Nicosia, at that time a small ancient town, nestling behind walls that had been built by the Venetians. Turks and Greeks lived there, and while each had an area, which was predominantly their own – ‘ethnic’ as we would now say – there was no apparent friction between the two races. Later, when we had moved about the island quite a lot, we found that this was the case everywhere. Indeed most villages had a mix, and we could not distinguish between Greek and Turk, except by the names above shops.
Everyone was very friendly, the country itself very beautiful, and the weather perfect, if a little on the warm side. By contrast with the desert, this was a land flowing with milk and honey.
Most evenings, a truck went into Nicosia, and those who wanted to could go. In practice, after the first few visits most of us went to town only on Saturday evenings. The reason was lack of money. In the case of the married men this was a chronic problem because we were still paying off the extra marriage allowance our wives were getting. My pay had increased somewhat due to my being rated as a Motor Mechanic Class 1, which was worth 6d a day. It made no difference to what I was paid though, still one shilling a day. Cyprus money was a peculiar mixture of the Turkish Ottoman Empire and the British Empire. The standard unit was the Cyprus Pound, divided into shillings, and then divided again into piastres and millemes. There were five piastres to the shilling, which of course gave one hundred to the pound! The pound was worth the same as a pound sterling. The coins were very similar to those we were used to at home, but the half crown was called “Two and a half shillings” and what would have been a sixpenny piece “Half a shilling.” Whatever they were called, we didn’t get very many of them, and my visits to town were usually spaced out to once a fortnight.
The drill was to park the truck under the walls, where there was a wide area, like a dry moat and dozens of buses, which plied all round the island, parked, and where there was usually a lively market going on. We then made for the barber and had a luxurious shave with hot face towels. Barbers did a roaring trade.
They also dabbled in the sale of booze, of which there was no shortage in Cyprus. Apart from the wines, which were rather sweet, Cyprus brandy was the thing. A bottle of ‘Hajipavlou’, “genuine three star” could be bought for a shilling, although a small bottle of beer cost half as much again. This brandy was lethal stuff, but being so cheap, a lot of it was drunk and a lot of heavy hangovers resulted. Ledra Street, the main thoroughfare through Nicosia, was full of shops of all description, and sprinkled with quite a lot of bars. These often had a cafe or restaurant adjoining. On Saturday nights the place was teeming with soldiers, all intent on having a good time. Drinks in the bars had mostly one price only – one piastre a glass. It was possible to get thoroughly tight on one shilling, have a haircut for another shilling and a plate of egg and chips for another. We usually did those three things but not in that order. Military Police, with their red caps and snowy white webbing, stalked up and down the street, ready and willing to arrest anyone causing a disturbance, so we were generally a well behaved lot.