March 1941
We had orders to move up to Benghazi and drove up out of ‘our’ gulch for the last time. On the main road we met trucks carrying tanks back down to Egypt, on their way to Greece. We went through Tobruk, quite a sight with the harbour at first seeming to be full of shipping. The ships we could see were Italian vessels, including one battleship. Our bombers had sunk them all, but so shallow was the harbour that they were sitting on the bottom.
We pressed on past the Italian seaplane base at Bomba; with one forlorn looking plane still sitting there, perhaps that was on the bottom too! We then started climbing up to another plateau, which stretched for a long way along the coast on the road to Derna. This was quite a sizeable town on the sea tucked under an escarpment that rose steeply from a flat plain, which looked quite green and fertile.
I was still driving the big Fiat and was enjoying it very much. It was equipped with a five speed gearbox and another two speed box, what I think is today called a “splitter box”, because it was possible, by adroit use of both boxes to ‘split’ each ratio of the main box. Thus by changing from high fourth gear to low fourth gear and then to high third and so on, one could produce a better flow of power from the engine which helped when climbing long hills. The truck was heavily laden with stores and coming up from Derna on to the plateau, called for several miles of heavy pulling up a steep gradient. Unknown to me, the water pump had been leaking badly and just as we topped the final rise, the engine gave up the ghost.
We were already a long way behind the rest of the company vehicles, but one of the officers had stayed behind in Derna for some reason, and soon came up behind us. We needed water, and luckily he was carrying about twenty gallons in cans on his Morris pick up. After a long wait for the engine to cool we refilled the radiator. Then came the business of tow starting the engine, nearly burning out the Morris clutch in the process.
I stopped after a while to check the water level in the radiator, and found we needed a whole two-gallon can to refill it. It was now getting late in the day. We had no idea of how far in front the rest of the company was, or where they would be staying for the night. Our officer decided that we would drive on through the night until we came up with them. This posed two problems. The Fiat had no lights, and we had used a lot of the water already. He went back to Derna for more water, while my mate and I fished out what we had in the way of food and had a scratch meal. When he came back, he brought still more water cans and we set off once more.
When darkness fell I found it very difficult to follow the Morris because it took so long for the Fiat to pick up speed. The only light on the Morris was the ‘convoy’ light, as it was called, which was just one small bulb concealed in the rear of the chassis and shining its light on the cover of the rear axle, which was painted white for the purpose. This was fine, as long as the following vehicle was close to the leader but not much use otherwise.
Fortunately there was no risk of losing our way, as there was only one surfaced road anywhere in those parts and all we had to do was to stay on it. After a deal of delay because it just wasn’t possible to see anything ahead on such a pitch-black night, the lieutenant threw caution to the winds and switched on the headlamps on his truck. We then evolved a method, which got us along as fast as the Fiat could travel. He drove on the left of the road and I came alongside on the right, when I could see the road in his headlamps as well as he could. He then regulated his speed so as to remain level with my cab and we went along in fine style with him following my speed instead of me trying to keep up with him.
We had a nasty moment at some time during the night when a truck coming the other way with no lights on suddenly appeared in the headlamps. Whoever it was must have had quite a shock to find an invisible vehicle beside a visible one. He made a mighty swerve off the road into the desert, and we kept rolling along.
We had to halt several times to refill the radiator, but apart from that one vehicle we saw no one else either on or near the road during the night. When daylight came we stopped off the road to wait for the rest of 295 to catch us up. We had seen no sign of them en route, but realised they must be behind us, as they would not have travelled in the dark: None of us had had any sleep for twenty-four hours and were all utterly weary. I simply folded my arms across the steering wheel and put my head down on them and slept.
Later that morning the company caught us up, and we tagged along behind again. We were only about fifty miles from Benghazi, we discovered. As we were nearing the town I saw a shot up Fiat truck by the roadside and got permission from Jeff to stop and get the cylinder head off it, as I was convinced that we had a crack in one of ours the (engine was a five cylinder Gardner made under license by Fiat).
Motor Mechanics in the Army were issued with a “Fitters Box” which contained some basic tools including a set of box spanners. Socket spanners and ring spanners had not been recognised by the War Department. Naturally the spanners were all in Whitworth sizes, and the Fiat hexagons were all in metric sizes. As an exercise in ingenuity I recommend any one to remove a diesel cylinder head using only flat spanners and box spanners of the wrong size! Sure enough, the two cylinder head on my truck had a crack between two valves, and when the replacement was fitted, and water pump leak improved, she ran as well as ever.