Chapter 10
CHAPTER 10: JAUNDICE AND AFTER
The lull in the fighting continued as I was bundled into the back of a three-ton truck that was collecting casualties for evacuation. We sat and sprawled on the floor of the truck as we bumped and jolted for several hours across the desert until we arrived at Benghazi airport. I was not unduly worried by the long and uncomfortable drive. I was feeling rather iii and the journey could do little to add to my overwhelming nausea. It must have been much worse for the dozen or so New Zealanders who had been wounded in a recent skirmish to the south and who groaned painfully with every jolt and lurch.
Benghazi airport was an area of sand pegged out in the desert. As an airport it had just been brought back into use after the German retreat. Our truckload joined the groups of sick and wounded sitting around the perimeter. The logistics of air evacuation were in their infancy. An officer told us that a plane might possibly pick us up during the day and fly us to hospital in Cairo or elsewhere in the Nile Delta. Or possibly not, in which case we would remain huddled in the desert overnight, hoping for better luck the following day. In fact we were in luck now, as a plane landed before dusk to collect a miscellaneous group of waiting sick and wounded. We were bundled on to the plane, some of us on stretchers that were laid out on the floor. We asked the young pilot where he was taking us. “Maybe Tobruk. Maybe Cairo if I have enough fuel.”
He didnt have enough fuel. We landed at sunset at an improvised airstrip at El Adem, were piled into a truck, and were driven to the Casualty Clearing Station (CCS) on the edge of Tobruk. A CCS is an intermediate station between the forward first aid posts and the base hospitals. It is usually sited well behind the lines out of gunshot range. It has a team of doctors and nurses who can perform emergency operations. The accommodation is somewhat makeshift: at Tobruk it consisted of several large tents in which we lay on stretchers in tightly packed rows. You don't realise how narrow a stretcher is until you have to lie on it for a long time. I spent four days on my stretcher in the Tobruk CCS.
The four days included Christmas Day 1942. A doctor stopped briefly by my stretcher that morning, observed my yellow skin, said “No alcohol, no fat”, and continued on his rounds. He was closely followed by an orderly bringing round our Christmas breakfast, a generous plateful of the unbelievably greasy and slimy tinned bacon that constituted the ration. Other equally unappetising meals were served in due course. I couldn't face any of them. The days were uneventful except for regular sandstorms that blew through the tent, covering everyone and everything with Tobruk sand. This sand had lain undisturbed for centuries. It was now wreaking its vengeance for its violation during the past two years by tanks, trucks, shells, and bombs.
By my fourth day the CCS had filled up, mostly with jaundiced soldiers. By now the Royal Engineers had repaired the track from Tobruk railhead which had been derelict for years — the same rail track which on its way to the Delta had run past the halt at Tel el Eisa next to the burnt out tank with the dead Germans. The yellowing troops were uniformly cheerful as we left our stretchers and boarded the train. We had no idea where the train would dump us, but wherever the journey ended there would be a hospital with beds, sheets — yes, sheets! — and probably there would be pretty nurses to look after us.
The train, pulled by a steam engine, moved slowly across the desert and into the green of the Nile Delta. As the train approached the populated areas after the long haul through the Libyan desert and into Egypt, it was boarded by Arab vendors selling dates and other fruits. We were always discouraged from buying from the locals because of the dangers of contracting some infection from unwashed produce. Now we were heading for hospital anyway, we haggled and joked and those who had any appetite stuffed themselves with sweet dates.
I dont remember how many days passed in the train before we were eventually unloaded by the Suez Canal at Kantara into Number One General Hospital. I think that by then it was ten days since I had left my desert tent at Mersa Brega. I know that I was a stone and a half lighter than my usual weight. I sank gratefully into a bed with sheets for the first time for eighteen months and subsided into a deep sleep. Some time later I was rudely awakened by a hospital orderly with a long form to fill in and a lot of questions starting with address of next of kin. I made clear to him that this was not the time for such formalities, turned over, and went back to sleep.
These days there is Hepatitis A, B, C, and probably D as well. Some of them are more dangerous than others. In 1942 it was just jaundice. In the 1960’s it was discovered that the disease could be transmitted by blood transfusion, with serious or even fatal results: I was summarily removed from the list of voluntary blood donors. Later still, in 1994, I was admitted to a London hospital, after a visit to the Mexican rain forest, with an infected ankle. A young doctor, checking on new admissions, enquired about my medical history. I told him that I had caught jaundice in the army in 1942.
“Was it sexually transmitted?” he asked.
“You must be joking. I was in the middle of the bloody desert.”
HOSPITAL
I must have been in the Number One General for about two weeks. I was feeling pretty lousy and can’t remember much about it. I shared a ward with an Army Captain who had gone down with jaundice for a second time. He was terribly emaciated and I think he was dying. In charge of our wing was a formidable character called Sister Brown. She got us up and moving as soon as she could and rather earlier than we would have preferred. The hospital had some miserable gardens withering in the sand. Sister Brown had me planting out some distressed geraniums. We had no trowel but she gave me a teaspoon and told me to get on with it. She could have seen off Rommel and the Afrika Korps with very little assistance from Monty.
CONVALESCENT LEAVE
On leaving hospital I was granted fourteen days convalescent leave. I decided to spend it in Palestine, then still ruled by the British under League of Nations mandate following its liberation from the Ottoman Empire at the end of the first World War. The British administration presided uneasily over the Arab and Jewish populations, to whom they had made mutually incompatible promises. The two populations fought each other intermittently and both attacked the British from time to time.
I had relatives in Palestine. My great-uncle Moses (Uncle Moss) and my great-aunt Debbie were ardent Zionists and had emigrated to Palestine in the 1930’s together with two of their daughters, Freda and Ruth. Uncle Moss grew oranges there and died before the war: Auntie Debbie lived in a flat in Tel Aviv: Freda and Ruth both married in Palestine and were now separated from their husbands and later divorced. Both had taken up careers in radio. Freda was an announcer for the Egyptian Broadcasting Service in Cairo, Ruth for the Palestine Broadcasting Corporation in Jerusalem. I headed for Jerusalem where Ruth put me up in the flat she shared with her four-year old son Michael.
Michael was a sociable boy with a good flow of conversation. He spoke English, Hebrew, and Arabic with equal facility. Later he had a distinguished career in the Israeli diplomatic service. I paid a call on Aunt Debbie, a sturdy sunburned lady in Tel Aviv, but spent the rest of my stay being shown round Jerusalem by Ruth and being introduced to her friends. She used to read the six o’ clock news every evening. Her flat was three minutes’ walk from the studios: she would leave at exactly five to six and never sounded out of breath when she read the first sentence. One evening, after my stay with her, a bomb went off in the studio during the news. The explosion was clearly audible to the listeners. Ruth continued to read the news without any hesitation. It was only a small bomb, planted by an Arab terrorist, but the BBC (who ran the Palestine service) would have been proud of her.
Ruth undertook to arrange my return journey to Egypt with the help of friends in the British military. There was some last minute complication. I had to fly back by the only flight available at short notice. This was by flying boat from the Dead Sea. We drove from Jerusalem, through the lunar landscape, to a desolate spot on the shore. I took a quick dip in the salty and sticky waters before boarding a flying boat. We flew over the even more fantastic landscape of the Sinai peninsula, circled over Cairo, and landed on the Nile by Gezira Island.
GUNNERY INSTRUCTOR
I reported back for duty at the Royal Artillery Base Depot, Almaza. The Depot was on the fringe of Heliopolis, Cairo's prosperous north-eastern suburb. Like the Nile Delta, Cairo suddenly stopped on the edge of the desert. The Depot consisted of a group of huts, dozens of tents, and a lot of sand. We lived in large square tents, sleeping six junior officers, dug in two feet deep into the desert. Everything was covered with drifting sand, especially when the tent was invaded by a ‘sand-devil’. These were minor whirlwinds which would pursue a zig-zag course through the camp. You could see them coming, and hoped — charitably — that the twisting column of sand would swerve in time to avoid your tent and engulf the neighbouring one. If you got a direct hit, your kit would be thrown around and everything penetrated by fine sand.
I was told that after a bout of jaundice there could be no question of returning to active service for several months. During this period I would be a gunnery instructor with the field artillery. This was some consolation for being kept back at base, as I would be with the 25-pounders for which I had developed a certain affection at OCTU before being posted unceremoniously to an anti-tank regiment. My senior officer was Captain Evans, an energetic and cheerful Welsh regular soldier who had served in Palestine before the war. He was a tremendous enthusiast for realistic training, and developed a scheme for dividing a squad into two units and getting one to dig trenches and take shelter in them while the other unit trained a troop of guns on them and fired smoke shells. These shells contained smoke canisters instead of shrapnel and were used in battle to conceal troop movements or to cover a withdrawal (not with much success to judge from my later experience in the Normandy bridgehead). The scheme was firmly vetoed by higher authority, to the chagrin of Captain Evans, who said “Only smoke shells, mind you. No-
one would be killed.”
The higher authority was Major Thomas who had been a gunnery instructor in peace time. He had fought in the early desert battles where he had lost a leg, amputated high up on the thigh. He had a very good artificial leg, or presumably two. Once when I called at his tent to check my orders I found that he was out but his spare leg was disconcertingly standing guard over his bed.
My job at Almaza was to teach the elements of gunnery to soldiers qualified to become ‘number ones’ -sergeants in charge of a 25-pounder and its crew. Some had battle experience, others not. The squad I remember best was a group of keen young South Africans, anxious to get to the front and avenge the surrender of their fellow countrymen at Tobruk. Part of our training was carried out in the camp. The more interesting part took place on the firing ranges in the desert, a few miles out ofCairo on the way to Suez.
All exercises started by getting the troop of four 25-pounders into action. This involved manhandling the guns into position, usually across a hundred yard front, and adjusting their position until they were exactly parallel. The Gun Position Officer would set up his director (a simple theodolite) a hundred or two yards from the guns and call out individual angles to each gun. The number three of each crew would set his individual angle on the gun sight, and the gun would be manoeuvred until the director appeared in the centre of the gun sight. If each gun performed this task correctly, the guns would be parallel. We first practised this on the parade ground, then on the firing ranges. We perfected the operation by daylight, then carried it out by night, with a lamp on the director.
An alternative method was to take an identifiable distant object, say, a mile away, and give the guns the same angle so that the error of parallelism was negligible. Under this method, the GPO would summon the sergeants to him, and point to the distant object in order to make sure that everyone was sighting on the same point.
This alternative method was more often used by day than by night, since it would be rare for a distant light to be clearly identifiable. However, during one course I noticed that soon after dusk the planet Venus was bright and unmistakeable, and low enough in the sky to be visible through the gun sights. I thought it would add novelty to the course if I were to take Venus as our aiming point on a night exercise. It would provide a challenge to the gun crews as we would have to synchronise our sightings since the planet would not be standing still.
In the afternoon I explained the plan to the course. They greeted it with amused scepticism. In the evening we deployed the guns on the parade ground. Venus was shining brilliantly, conveniently near the full moon for easy identification. I trained my director on the planet and called out “Aiming Point Venus!” The four number ones doubled up to the director where they waited expectantly for me to indicate the aiming point.
At this critical moment I found that Venus had completely disappeared, though there was not a cloud in the star-spangled sky. There was an embarrassed silence. “Must be behind the moon”, I explained, with no great conviction, “We’ll have to wait a few minutes.” There was some mutinous mumbling among the sergeants, who hinted that they had better things to do in the evenings than stand around on the parade ground watching for a disappearing planet. Five minutes later I was vindicated. Venus emerged coyly from behind the moon, and the exercise was duly completed. There was an occultation of Venus by the Moon in 1943, on July 6 - see Around the year 1943 with sun, moon, and planets
This improbable tale can be verified by consulting an astronomical reference book such as the Nautical Almanac. The date, I believe, was early in February 1943.
I enjoyed my work as a gunnery instructor. Of course I would rather have been on active service with my regiment, but I realised that I was still far from fit after the jaundice, and the sensation of nausea lingered for several months. The food in the mess was not at all bad, the Army rations being livened up with fresh fruit and vegetables, but I had little appetite for them.
Meanwhile greater events were being enacted a thousand miles or more to the west. The Eighth Army had resumed their advance, despite my absence from the field, and went on to capture Tripoli. The Eleventh Hussars, the armoured car unit of the famous Seventh Armoured Division, drove into the city on 23rd January 1943. I was in the Almaza Mess when I heard the announcement being read over Cairo radio by cousin Freda. This victory would enable supplies to be landed at the port, so that - unlike the two previous campaigns — Libya could be secured and the advance continued into Tunisia where the inexperienced First Army was bogged down by fierce German opposition after the initial November landings in Algeria.
I RA Base Depot, Almaza This photograph shows gunnery instructors at Almaza, with the squad under instruction. Centre is Captain Evans, the mad Welshman who wanted to use live shells in training exercises. I am to his right. To my right is Sergeant Pearce, an auburn-haired Devonian. His pallor clearly indicates the lack of pigmentation that made him unable to tan. His skin simply blistered in the sun. To his disappointment he had to be sent home from the desert.
My main recreation during this period was to take a sedate afternoon tea with Freda at weekends. Not for me were the fleshpots of Cairo, apart from occasional visits to Groppi's Teashop to gorge on their luscious cream cakes. Tea with Freda was taken in her hotel, the Continental, unbelievably luxurious to my eyes, but definitely number two to the legendary Shepheards. Freda not only read the news, but also ran a weekly programme called “Speaking from Experience” in which she interviewed whichever distinguished person was passing through Cairo that week.
The personage of the week often joined us for tea. One of Freda's guests was an American introduced to me as Mr. Twitchell. He was old, and — I thought — rather boring. Years later I read that he was a geologist who believed, unlike his British colleagues, that there was a lot of oil under the sands of Saudi Arabia. Taking advantage of the British lack of interest, and with the support of the State Department, he negotiated a concession with the Saudi government that in due course brought vast profits to American oil companies. It also ensured continued US influence in that country long after the Saudis had taken control over their own oil resources. The boring Mr. Twitchell probably had as much influence on the geopolitics of the twentieth century as any other man. (more information on Twitchel)
Another guest was Chester Morrison, the leading American war correspondent with the Eighth Army. For several weeks he would join us regularly for tea. The tea-times became longer and extended to evening drinks. Chester introduced me to the Mint Juleep. A year later, after her divorce from her first husband, Freda married him. He was a most loveable man, and a great admirer of the Eighth Army. He had been in the US Navy in the first World War. He had the rare distinction, for an American journalist, of being awarded a British Military Cross. He had rescued soldiers from a burning vehicle under enemy fire. He never wore the decoration and I would never have known if Freda hadn’t told me.
Forty years later, long after he had died from cirrhosis of the liver — he was a hard drinker, though never the worse for wear — I was able to inspect his war notebooks. They had been bequeathed to the State archives at Madison, Wisconsin, where I happened to be for my daughter’s wedding.
The notebooks contained rough jottings made during the heat of battle — quite literally the heat of battle in the great tank massacres of 1941 in ‘The Cauldron' south of Tobruk. They included eye-witness accounts of the battles, conversations with commanders and the rank and file, and careful diagrams of German mines showing how to defuse them. They were the raw material of his nightly broadcasts to the American radio networks.
After the war Chester worked for an American magazine, and was undertaking a mission in Cairo when there was an unexpected rising against the Egyptian government, I think in 1951. Chester was out braving the fury of a mob that was looting and burning. When he returned to Shepheards where he had been staying, the hotel was in flames. He had taken the key of his room with him. I now have it as a keepsake.
Another relaxation was attending evening concerts of classical records played by an organization called “Music for All”. In retrospect, my recreations appear remarkably modest, compared with those enjoyed in war novels by officers on leave from the desert. In extenuation, I plead that I was still far from my best after the jaundice. I also had in mind some unfortunate experiences of my fellow soldiers. Bombardier Kenyon, who in civil life would never have ventured far beyond his local pub, was enticed into a Cairo den by the promise of unimaginable pleasures, only to wake up next morning with a nasty headache and an empty wallet after being drugged.
Somewhere in Cairo there was a military location office, set up primarily for the forwarding of mail. I hadn’t received any letters for several months, so I optimistically told them where I was. I then enquired the location of my school friend Brian James who had gone out to the Middle East some time before as a Sergeant-Pilot. The location office told me he was on active service with Coastal Command at Shalufa in Egypt. I was able to contact him. We managed to spend an evening in Cairo together.
Our evening was complicated by our difference in rank: there were no hotels, clubs, or restaurants open to both officers and other ranks. We finished up clandestinely talking the night away in his hotel room, a high garret above the Cairo streets. We looked out of the window and identified the constellations. The bright star near Orion he called Beetle Juice. He had a large hole in the toe of one of his socks. Brian was a mathematician like myself, though not a cricketer (but a great little scrum half). He had won a scholarship to Oxford which he was never to take up. I never saw him again. His plane crashed after the end of the war when he was landing at Djibouti in French Somaliland as it was then.
Another of my dearest friends, Michael Brett, was also a sergeant in the RAP, a rear gunner. While I was in Cairo, he was killed when his plane was shot down in a bombing raid over the German submarine base in Brest. I did not know this until several months later. He was a regular and amusing correspondent. Owing to the vagaries of wartime correspondence with the forces, his cheerful letters continued to reach me long after his death. Michael had no great intellectual pretensions and had just started work as a bank clerk before he volunteered for the RAF. He was a graceful, if somewhat casual, left handed batsman, and an accurate left arm bowler with an easy action. He had big brown eyes which led to his nickname, Monkey Brett. His personality would today be described as laid back. We shared the same sort of zany humour. In 1939 just before the outbreak of war the two of us went on a cycle tour down to Devon. We drank rough cider in pubs at lunchtime and dozed in the hedgerows in the heat of the afternoon.
I stayed on at Almaza, instructing and awaiting posting, through the spring and early summer of 1943. The African war drew to a close with the surrender of 200,000 Germans at Cap Bon in Tunisia. We did a good deal of live shooting from 25-pounders on the desert ranges a few miles out of Cairo along the Suez road. Here we trained in fire control from observation posts, correcting the fire of our guns towards the target by varying line and range as in the sand-table exercises of my earlier training. I impressed Major Thomas sufficiently to be earmarked for posting to one of the elite artillery regiments of the Eighth Army, the 5th RHA (Royal Horse Artillery, although long bereft of their horses). 3 RHA and 5RHA were the two field regiments of the Desert Rats, the Seventh Armoured Division whose symbol was a red jerboa, a small rodent said to frequent the Western Desert though I never saw one.
In June 1943 I was ordered to report to 5RHA. They were stationed in the Libyan desert halfway between Tripoli and Homs, which was really nowhere in particular. First, for some reason that I never understood, I had to report to my old anti-tank regiment that was now at Mena near the pyramids, and get my discharge, as it were, from the Colonel. I don t think he had any option in the matter, which — together with the sand and the heat — may have accounted for his extreme bad temper when I saluted him in his tent. He treated me as a deserter showing cowardice in the face of the enemy. This was all the more surprising as, when I was in his regiment, he showed scant appreciation of my soldierly qualities and gave me the distinct impression that he thought the regiment would be better off without me.