Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9: DESERT WAR

It was early in September when we disembarked at Suez. We left the S.S.Kosciusko without regret, even if we suspected that we were going out of the flying pan into the fire. We were slightly cooler by the banks of the Suez Canal than we had been on board the ancient troopship as it sweltered up the Red Sea in August, but the temperature of the battles not far to our west had reached boiling point. On the western side of the Nile, separated from us by the green triangle of the Delta, the desert was aflame with burning tanks as Rommel moved in for the fmal assault that would carry his troops, according to Hitler's plan, past Cairo and to the Suez Canal and beyond.

The desert war, up to September 1942 when we were to join it, had been a ding-dong affair. Its triumphs and tragedies had never been far from the headlines of British newspapers. It was the only theatre, after Dunkirk, in which Allied troops had been heavily engaged. The battleground was the Western Desert, the vast expanse of sand that stretched for fifteen hundred miles across Egypt and Cyrenaica.

The Western Desert stretched from the Nile Delta to the Tripolitania province of Libya. It was bounded on the north by the Mediterranean, and extended south into the Sahara. Libya had been brutally colonised by Mussolini and was garrisoned by Italian troops. Italian settlers along the narrow fertile coastal strip and in the Jebel Aktar had left with the onset of war, and the nomadic Senussi had departed from their native desert taking their herds and black tents further south. Egypt had been in effect a British protectorate, nominally independent and neutral, but occupied by British troops under treaty. The Egyptians would have been happy to join the winning side, whichever it was.

Soon after Italy entered the war in 1940, a daring advance by troops from Britain and the Empire (Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa) under General Wavell routed a vastly more numerous Italian Army and took most of them prisoner. Wavell's troops, thinly strung out, then held a line from El Agheila near the border between Libya's two provinces. In 1941 Hitler sent across the Mediterranean crack German troops under General Rommel to reinforce the unreliable Italians. After fearsome tank battles the Allies were forced back to their starting line inside the Egyptian frontier, apart from an outpost at Tobruk on the coast which held out against continuous battering from land and air. The following year the Allies, now including a Free French unit that won lasting fame, advanced again towards the apparently unattainable goal of Tripoli, only to be beaten back out of Libya by the most formidable and menacing attack of the African campaign. The ding-dong nature of the desert warfare was partly due to logistics. Unless the advancing armies could capture a major port, their lines of communication were stretched to the limit while the defending army was near to its supply bases.

In the summer of 1942, while we were at sea, Rommel's Afrika Korps swept across Libya and further into Egypt than any previous advance. The fall of Tobruk came as sombre news when we were on the Awatea in the South Atlantic. The roll-call of familiar desert names unrolled once more: Agedabia, El Adem, Knightsbridge, Sollum, Halfaya, Sidi Barrani, Mersa Matruh - and now a new name, El Alamein. Rommel was within a day's march of the Delta. The Cairo air was thick with smoke as documents were burnt in diplomatic and military offices. Plans were being made to withdraw from Egypt into Palestine or Iraq. Meanwhile other German armies were driving down Soviet Russia into the Caucasus in a pincer movement that could open the way to the Middle East and India.

We did not know it, but even as we landed the tide of battle was turning. A new commander, General Montgomery had taken over the Eighth Army in the desert. Monty forbade any talk of further retreat. His words were backed by massive supplies of guns and tanks that followed the troop reinforcements of which we were part. Rommel's advance was held a few miles beyond El Alamein. From Tel el Eisa (the hill of Jesus) southwards to the impassable Qattara depression the armies faced each other in one of the brief spells of static warfare that punctuated the mobile battles of the desert. Both sides had thrown in all they had and had ground to an uneasy halt.

The place names mentioned here were household names in England. But they did not denote towns or villages that could be recognized as dwelling places. Tobruk and Benghazi on the coast must have been attractive little resorts before the war: rich Italians used to holiday there with their mistresses. Now they were heaps of ruins, their harbours graveyards to hundreds of ships. In the heart of the desert, former Senussi settlements had been deserted, leaving no trace. Still other place names, such as Knightsbridge, simply denoted areas of empty desert christened with familiar names by the troops and now criss-crossed with tank tracks and littered with burnt-out tanks, land mines, and other debris of war.

So this was the scene we were about to enter. Meanwhile we stayed a few days at Port Tewfiq where our gear and light equipment was unloaded from the Kosciusko into barges and from barges to the dockside. The heavy armament was to join us later after being unloaded from ships that had braved the German air command of the Mediterranean. Our barges were unloaded by local dock employees who showed little enthusiasm for the task. When the operation was completed we drove a few miles to a tented camp not far from the Bitter Lakes near the southern end of the canal. We used to swim in these lakes which were about four feet deep. The pilots of a Hurricane Squadron stationed nearby amused themselves by skimming over the surface for the pleasure of seeing us duck.

We were re-united with our guns and heavy equipment. One afternoon we drove in convoy along the desert road, reaching Cairo in the evening. Through Cairo the convoy was directed by Military Police to the Abassiah Barracks where we passed the night. We must have entered the city through the more prosperous suburbs, probably Heliopolis: I recall wide streets, tall houses with balconies, and an overpowering scent of jasmine. Next day we moved out to another tented camp, almost immediately below the Great Pyramids. In the Suez desert we were on soft, shifting sand — quite unlike the firmer surface we were to encounter in the Western Desert — and it was hard and hot work to walk any distance among the small hills where we were encamped.

Within days everyone succumbed to sandfly fever, reputed to attack all newcomers to the desert. You ran a high fever and were sent to hospital for a few days. I was sent to Heiwan Hospital, a few miles up the Nile from Cairo. It was a spacious stone building, deliciously cool after the stifling heat of a desert tent. Back in camp, we lived virtually under the shadow of the pyramids, but had no opportunity to visit them. We were on constant alert, and girding ourselves for battle, though with the lapse of time the details of the girding now escape me. Probably we had kit inspections. Certainly we had parades — tests of endurance as the persistent flies of Egypt crawled all over our faces, lingering lovingly on the moisture of lips, nose, and eyes.

And of course we had exercises, manoeuvring our six-pounders into battle positions in the soft sand. We had left the Field Regiment with whom we had travelled out and had joined a proper Anti-Tank Regiment. Unfortunately our new Colonel had not heard of the enfilading tactics that we had been enjoined to follow. He reproved me for siting my guns to fire sideways, and instructed that they should point forward at the enemy. A sound Army maxim, when receiving contradictory orders, was “Obey the last orders received”. So I did.

BATTLE INOCULATION

In early October the officers of the newly arrived regiment were posted individually to veteran units at the front line for battle inoculation. I had the good fortune to be sent to an anti-tank troop of the legendary Ninth Australian Division at Tel el Eisa. This Division had fought with the Eighth Army throughout the desert campaigns. They had a healthy respect for the Afrika Korps and a healthy contempt for all their own senior commanders and most of their allies. The Troop Commander invited me to share his dugout. This was one of the rare phases of the war when we lived in trenches. Apart from the odd patrol there was little activity except for desultory shelling. The trenches had been occupied for a month and were deep enough to live in comfortably. They were dry, and free of wild life except for an occasional friendly dung beetle.

Not long before, this site had been a scene of dramatic violence. All around us were the shattered and burnt hulks of German Mark III tanks which the guns of this Australian troop had destroyed. It was encouraging to see that the troop had wrought this havoc with four six pounder guns, together with two captured Italian anti-tank guns and one German. The Australians gave the impression of fighting their own private war: they hung on to any booty they captured.

The only building at Tel el Eisa was the railway station, an unadorned concrete shed about the size of a small garage. Our trench was a couple of hundred yards south of the station. In between was a knocked out tank containing three or four twisted and burnt bodies. Clouds of flies hovered over the tank, and a nauseating stench of burnt and decaying flesh filled the afternoon air. The Aussies really ought to have buried the German bodies, but it would have been a messy job and they had ceased to be fussy about such things.

Our seven guns were dug in, and the site was well concealed apart from the sanitary facilities. These consisted of a box over a hole dug in the middle of the desert about fifty yards behind the guns. You sat on top of this on a makeshift lavatory seat in full view of the rest of the troop. Any sense of self-consciousness soon wore off. You hoped the Germans wouldn’t start shelling while you were seated on the thunder-box as it was called. If they did you made a hasty and undignified dash for the nearest trench.

A slight rise shielded us from the view of German observation posts. I was driven around the site and a little way along the coast road that lay parallel to the railway and to the north of it. As you drove towards the enemy lines and approached the crest, the Aussies had put up a sign saying “HEY!”. Fifty yards further on, a second sign warned “DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE?”. Another fifty yards, a third sign said “IF YOU GO ANY FURTHER TAKE ONE OF THESE”; from this sign dangled one of the little white crosses that marked our desert graves.

DESERT CHASE

I had enjoyed living with the Australians. They were a friendly and disrespectful lot. They called their troop commander by his first name, a habit deeply shocking to British ears. I don’t now recall his name, but recall he had been a bank clerk in Sydney.

After a week of ‘battle inoculation’ it was time to return to my unit. What had I learned from the experience? I had discovered that Australians were good blokes — a view I have held ever since. I found out that real soldiers, in real warfare in the desert, wore the clothes that suited them: no shirt, tattered shorts, and bareheaded except when there were actual shells and bullets whistling around when a tin hat could be hastily donned. And that there could be a degree of familiarity between officers and other ranks without the total collapse of morale and discipline feared by the British Army.

I drove back across the desert until meeting the road from Cairo to Alexandria and turning south. Here was a breathtaking sight. Moving north was a continuous stream of guns, Bren carriers, armoured cars, half tracks, and tanks on transporters, on their way to the battle zone. These were the preparations, as I learned later, for the battle of Alamein. Never before had the Middle East seen such a weight of steel, such an array of armament, such a ferocity of fIrepower. It was an exhilarating spectacle. In cold logic, it looked as if at last we had the equipment needed to win a decisive victory in this long ding-dong desert war. On a more visceral level, the sight of so much destructive power seemed to evoke some primeval elation. I was to feel this again on the eve of the great battles in Europe in which I took part, and when the earth shook with the thunder of our tremendous artillery barrages. I feel no pride in this reaction, but it may have a place in the psychology of war.

A few days later I gathered my troop around me under the Pyramids in order to read to them, as instructed, the first of Monty’s historic ‘Orders of the Day’. This was the one in which we were exhorted to hit Rommel for six out of Africa. Monty reminded us that each day's advance would bring us a day's march nearer home (but omitted to tell us that we would have to fight the Italian campaign on the way). Finally we were reminded that Almighty God — always a close associate of Monty's — was on our side. I have wondered whether Rommel shared Monty's addiction to grandiloquent orders of the day (presumably without the cricketing metaphors). If so, it would be enlightening to compare them. At the time I was deeply moved. I sharply reproved Sergeant Behan for interjecting some irreverent comment. “Questions at the end” I said irritably. Later in the war, these rousing calls from Monty began to lose their effect: I am sure I was not the only officer who found them too embarrassing to read to battle-hardened and cynical troops.

We moved off at dawn next morning. We joined the dead straight road from Cairo to Alex. On our right, the green of the Delta. On our left, fifteen hundred miles of desert. After a couple of hours we left the road and spread out westwards across the desert towards the main battle zone. At the head of my troop I travelled in an eight-hundredweight Dodge pick-up, driven by a gentle and unmilitary man called Irwin At home, wherever we were, he managed to secure a copy of the Daily Mirror which he stuffed behind the seat. He did this with such regularity, even in the remote parts to which our exercises took us, that I half expected him to produce a copy in the middle of the desert.

I had a hole cut in the roof of the Dodge. Through this I could stand up and see where we were going and could control the movement of my troop by suitable gestures. One of these, taken from a handbook of cavalry training, was a sort of twirling signal that was the order to reverse — I thought this might come in handy. I devised others of a more mundane nature. A roll of lavatory paper waved by the right or left arm, as the case may be, indicated which side of the column should be used for the relevant purpose when we halted. Waving a mug, of course, was the signal to brew up.

‘Brewing up’ was the fine art of making tea. (The same phrase was used to describe what happened to a tank when it was ignited by enemy fire. This comfortable phrase was a bland distraction from the reality, which was usually that the tank crew were burnt to death.) In camp we had eaten in communal mess tents, with a separate officers’ mess. The meals were prepared by cooks of the Army Catering Corps who were attached to the Regiment. Once on operations, we moved to ‘truck messing’. The crew of each vehicle drew and cooked their own rations. This was much preferred by the troops because of the independence it gave them. The method of cooking was to take a perforated biscuit tin, half fill it with sand, pour petrol on the sand, and throw a lighted match at the can. The makeshift cooker burned with a steady flame under the billy can of water or whatever you were cooking. The direction of the wind was critical in deciding where to site the biscuit tin and where to stand when throwing the match. Tea was made by adding to the boiling water a packet of ‘compo tea’, a revolting powder of mixed tea, sugar, and milk substitute. Experienced desert troops could be drinking their brew within ten minutes of halting. Sometimes that was all the time there was.

Each vehicle carried its own reserve of petrol and water. These were contained in two-gallon cans carried in racks strapped to the outside of the vehicle. Supply and replenishment was the responsibility of the ‘Q' side of the Army. Normally, the rest of us didn’t have to bother — unless things went wrong. We were to find that things went badly wrong after a few days in the desert. The two- gallon cans, known appropriately as ‘flimsies’, proved unable to withstand the battering they received in the desert, and were found to be empty when most needed.

Most of the Western Desert was almost featureless. The ground was not flat but gently undulating. Small random hillocks followed no perceptible pattern. We were always issued with enough maps to cover any possible advance, but they had very little on them. One map was completely blank except for the grid squares and a dot marked ‘Pole in Barrel’. We wondered whether this marked the fate of a soldier from the Free Polish Unit that had recently joined the Eighth Army. Be that as it may, we never found this isolated landmark, though by my calculations we should have driven right past it. We navigated by dead reckoning, using the mileage recorded on the vehicle odometers (reasonably accurate even when the tyres were slipping on soft sand) and the sun compass fixed to the front of the truck.

The sand was fairly hard for the most part, good going for the most part for trucks and tanks. However, there were some extremely bumpy hard stretches that threatened to shake your vehicle to pieces, or at the very least to fracture its springs. Then you might suddenly find yourself in deep soft sand — as McCoy did when he got his whole troop bogged down. When stuck in soft sand, or preferably just before getting stuck, you leapt out of your truck, grabbed the sand channels carried in the back, and placed them under the wheels. A good driver could keep inching along in low gear while the channels were lifted and put again in front of the wheels, until he was out of trouble. If the driver lost his nerve and revved up, the truck just sank axel deep and had to be winched out.

The two essentials for desert travel were the sun compass and the sand channel. For both we were indebted to R.A. Bagnold and his expeditions of the nineteen twenties and thirties. In his ‘Libyan Sands’ he describes how he devised the original sun compass when preparing in 1927 for the first motor transport journey to the Siwa Oasis (previous exploration had been by camel). It was a sort of sundial in reverse. There was a graduated disc for each month. You set it on a stand fixed to the front of your truck, turned it to show the required direction, and told your driver to swing left or right as you advanced until the shadow of the gnomon fell over the correct graduation on the disc. You then tried to keep a straight course, fixing your eye on a small bush or slight bump some distance ahead.

The story of the sand channels is an even greater triumph of low technology. In his first explorations, Bagnold carried rolls of rabbit wire about twenty yards long, to be laid in front of each wheel track as drifts were encountered. The wire was springy and had to be carried tightly rolled: as a result it would jump up as it was laid, just when the car was about to reach it. Bagnold and his team experimented unsuccessfully with corrugated iron beaten into channels. Then one of the team “discovered, by nosing around the old-iron shops of Cairo, a stock ofstrong rolled-steel troughing designed in the [first] war for roofing dug-outs. We bought a couple of these, about five feet long.“. These proved their worth in 1929 in Bagnold's famous expedition to ‘Ain Dalla, deep in the Sahara. By the nineteen forties they were standard issue to the Eighth Army.

Apart from the patches of soft sand, driving was a lot easier in the desert than on roads. Soldiers who learned to drive in the desert were to be bewildered later by the constraints of driving on roads and by the proximity of other vehicles — later we had a lot of road accidents in Italy. After a typical day's driving in the desert we invariably inspected all vehicle suspensions. Damaged springs were bound up with wire, or replaced with spare parts cannibalised from wrecked vehicles, friendly or enemy. My Dodge could use springs from derelict German Opels. Wrecked trucks and tanks were systematically pillaged for supplies and spares. The admirable German Jerricans, far superior to our flimsies, were eagerly snapped up, even if it meant finding a cautious way through a minefield to strip it from an abandoned truck.

To start our westward advance, we had no need of navigation. The route was marked out for us by signs planted by the military police. These bore the insignia of the Division or Brigade: the HD of the 51st Highland Division, the jerboa of the 7th ‘Desert Rat’ Armoured Division to which we were now attached. These signs indicated the Divisional ‘Centre Line' to be followed until individual units branched off to their battle stations. Our line led us south of the main Alamein battlefields, where Rommel's army had been forced to retreat after heavy fighting. Through intelligence reports we got to know the German Divisions almost as well as our own. It was in the desert that we first came across the formidable 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions, and the elusive 90th Light. At Alamein, great Allied victory though it was, the bulk of enemy troops succeeded in withdrawing in fighting order. From now on, pursuit was the name of the game.

At Fort Cappuzzo, the Italian frontier outpost, I stood for the first time on enemy territory watching a mournful November sunrise. Soon after, we drove over a small land mine. It did little damage to the Dodge, and none at all to Irwin or myself. We sat on well filled sandbags with which we had packed our vehicles against just such an accident. The sandbags remained as a protection throughout the desert campaign. They were not emptied until the Eighth Army linked up with the First Army in Tunisia to end the African war. I was not present at that encounter, where — I was told — American troops enquired about the sandbags. The British troops explained that they had filled them at Alamein. “Gee, is that Alamein sand?” asked the Americans. Small quantities of the famous sand changed hands at high prices. Some U.S. veterans may still treasure phials of the precious substance.

We by-passed El Adem, scene of great tank battles in the earlier campaigns. At Bir Hakim there was a moving sight where the Free French had fought to the last man in an unavailing attempt to stem the German advance in the summer. Their guns lay shattered in drifting sand. All around, the wrecked hulks of German tanks testified to the skill and heroism of the French gunners.

At this stage, Monty made several attempts to cut off the retreating Germans and Italians. In the earlier Allied advances, tens of thousands of enemy troops had been by-passed and then captured by a daring thrust straight across the desert to Agedabia south of Benghazi, when our main attack had been expected to follow the coast road around the bulge of Cyrenaica. The direct route at one time had been wrongly thought impassable: in fact the most treacherous sands were even further to the south. For the third advance we once again followed the direct route. It was now known as C-track. It was no great adventure now, as the route was well worn with truck and tank tracks. Much of it was marked with used 40-gallon oil barrels. More sombre markers were the little white crosses over the graves of soldiers who had fallen in the earlier battles and had not yet been gathered into the official cemeteries that post-war visitors would visit in Tobruk and Benghazi. Rommel drew back his forces too swiftly to fall into the trap, and we encountered no opposition.

The remoteness of the area was appealing. When we passed the night midway along C-track we might well have been a hundred miles from any other human beings. In daylight we travelled well spaced out as a precaution against air attack. At night, if there seemed little danger from enemy columns, we closed up nose to tail in a ‘laager’, with orders to start up and drive straight ahead in the event of an alarm. The desert nights were magnificent. We would take a couple of blankets and stretch out on the sand, gazing up at a sky of black velvet illuminated by more stars than you could possibly imagine. The North Star was low in the sky. I devised a simple formula that deduced the time from the angle of one ‘edge’ of the Great Bear.

Nearing the end of C-track we arrived, according to my navigation, at a place called Zt Msus, though the place had ceased to exist except in the mind of the cartographer. Possible evidence that the area had once been inhabited appeared in the form of a small Arab boy, offering undersized eggs in exchange for tea - ‘Eggis for chai’, he chanted.

By this time we were dangerously short of water. Our supply lines extended nearly a thousand miles back to the Delta. Our ‘flimsies’ had sprung leaks: nearly all were empty. The local wells were all poisoned. We were rationed to half a pint per man for all purposes. This meant two-thirds of a mug of tea in the morning — I shaved in the last inch — and a swig or two for our water bottles. I kept this till nightfall, swirling the cool liquid round a dry mouth before swallowing it. We topped up our radiators by peeing into them: no liquid was wasted. We washed our clothes in petrol which was less scarce than water — and refrained from smoking. We cleaned our mess tins with sharp sand and did not wash our bodies at all. Once, when the tempo of the pursuit had slackened, I took my troop to the sea, twenty or thirty miles away. It felt indescribably luxurious to lie naked in the Mediterranean after and days in the desert. The return journey to our positions left us caked with dust and mud all over again.

We were now near enough to the German troops for us to receive on the regimental wireless sets the broadcasts beamed from Radio Belgrade to our opponents. With the rest of the Eighth Army we learned to know and love the theme song of the Afrika Korps, Lili Marlene. This was a sentimental and repetitive ballad about a German soldier longing for his sweetheart, but invariably sung by a woman with a husky voice that brought tears to the eyes of German and Allied soldiers alike. Even to-day, on the rare occasions when I hear the melody played, nostalgic memories of the desert come flooding back. Indeed the song was something of a bond between the opposing armies. Perhaps not the only bond — there was the desert experience as a whole: the desert war was the nearest thing to a ‘clean’ war, with no civilians slaughtered, no SS troops with the atrocities and reprisals that sullied the reputation of the German armies in Europe. Not long after the end of the war there were to be reunions between the desert troops of the Axis and the Allies.

The pursuit slowed down now. Any hope of cutting off large bodies of enemy troops was abandoned. A 48-hour sandstorm stopped all movement. Layers of sand covered us and everything we had. The temperature dropped to a level at which we were glad of our issue of four blankets apiece. The sandstorm was followed by rainstorms . Sand turned to mud which seriously clogged up the supply routes. Because of our extended lines of communication, many of the forward troops had to be sent back. We pushed beyond Agedabia, the limit of previous advances, to a salty desert landscape at Mersa Brega. Here, the Battery formed part of an attenuated front line able to do little more than probe the German defences before us.

We had virtually driven the enemy out of Cyrenaica. The conquest of Tripolitania lay ahead. We had outran most of our supplies, but not the hordes of flies which arrived in clouds within minutes of our occupying a fresh position. After feasting on unburied bodies, they would settle on the rims of our mugs and mess tins before we could start eating or drinking. I devised a cover for my drinking mug, made from a torn-up gas cape, which I could open just enough to sip my tea before any flies beat me to it. Cleaning our cutlery and mess tins with dry sand also carried its dangers. They gleamed beautifully but the practice carried dangers of infection carried by flies from our primitive sanitary arrangements.

Somewhere around Mersa Brega we were ordered into action. Further advance was impossible because of shortage of fuel and other supplies. A German counter-attack was thought likely. After a quick recce I deployed my troop in action and ordered them to dig in behind a low ridge. We had been on the move for nearly two weeks, and took advantage of this pause to brew up a decent meal. We had never actually been hungry, though the diet was monotonous and completely lacking in fresh food. The traditional square Army biscuit came into its own. Suitably hollowed out, it made an admirable frame for the photo of wife or girl friend. It could be eaten with its usual companion of tinned bully-beef either cold or incorporated into a stew. Put in a sandbag and gently crushed by a three-ton truck it made a coarse porridge with a hessian flavour. Sergeant Farquhar, recently recruited to my troop as a desert veteran from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, introduced a recipe for marmalade pudding using the crushed biscuits as a base.

Our tinned bacon was very salty and had a revolting slimy texture that could not be improved by any known method of cooking. M and V (tinned meat and vegetables) was a more popular dish. Particularly prized were tins of rich, sweet, sticky, condensed milk. I had kept one of these since Mersa Matruh, as a special treat for Irwin and myself, but the label had been blown off in a sandstorm. I opened it now. It turned out to be M and V.

The day after I had recorded this sad incident in the first draft of these memoirs, I listened to the broadcast recollections of the writer George MacDonald Fraser. He described an exactly similar disappointment in the Far East theatre, where he was fighting the Japanese in 1945. He carried with him an unlabelled tin, which he believed to be a can of fruit, throughout several days of hard infantry fighting. His sergeant carried a tin of condensed milk to go with it. During a lull in the battle, Fraser opened his tin of fruit, to find that it contained — carrots in brine. The fact that Fraser and I should recall such apparently trivial incidents after half a century must show that they aroused strong emotions at the time. After the monotony of most of the hard tack, a little luxury was a great event to be looked forward to. The frustration of being confronted by an opened tin of M and V or carrots in brine was correspondingly acute.

For my four guns I chose positions strung out about two hundred yards apart, ready to give mutually supporting fire in the event of a German counter-attack. The ground ahead fell away slightly: the flat desert stretched away to the west. We were not overlooked and no enemy was in sight. The armoured reconnaissance cars of the 11th Hussars patrolled the area between the two armies, but were dispersed over so wide a front that no-one was visible between ourselves and the Germans. I toured my guns before dusk while they were being dug in by their crews. We had sent back our vehicles to park two miles behind the line. I reported our position to Battery HQ and pitched my small bivouac tent just behind the guns.

Around midnight I set off on a tour of my guns to check that each team was settled in for the night and had one man on guard. I first called on Sergeant Behan and his crew. They were in good spirits. Behan himself radiated confidence and cheerfulness. I walked on in the direction of the next crew. After five minutes I realised that I had missed them, possibly having walked past them within a few yards. It was a dark night. After another five minutes I realised that I didn’t have the faintest idea where I was. It was one of the few nights in the year when thick cloud obscured every star in the sky. My compass needle had become unseated and was useless. I tried lying down to see if I could detect any silhouette of a gun. Nothing.

I tried to retrace my steps. Sure enough, I found Sergeant Behan for the second time. “Nice to see you again, Sir” — was he being sarcastic? Having, as I thought, got my bearings again, I walked confidently on to where the next gun should have been. Soon I found myself utterly lost again. I sat down and thought out a strategy. I walked a hundred yards in a straight line, made a right angle turn and walked another hundred yards, and so on until I had completed a square and returned — in theory — to my starting point. No guns had been encountered. I repeated the manoeuvre with a square of two hundred yards , then four hundred, then eight hundred. By this time I was beginning to feel rather lonely and very cold. At this point I decided to bed down in a shallow hollow in the sand to await the first glimmer of dawn. After an age, the eastern sky began to lighten. I made out the outline of half a dozen vehicles and approached them cautiously in case I had finished up behind the German lines. To my relief I found that I had bedded down among our own supply lines. I made fast time back to my guns to make a dawn tour of the troops, trying to appear as casual as possible.

For nearly a week there was complete inactivity on the front. During this time I began to feel distinctly unwell, with a strong sensation of nausea that could not be entirely attributed to the tinned bacon. My urine was the colour of vintage port. My skin began to display an unhealthy yellow hue beneath the tan. I couldn’t face the daily rations. I retired to my tent for a day. That day the rations included, miraculously, fresh oranges, one per man. I ate mine with delight. One of the drivers, a Sussex countryman called Dartnell, took pity on me and generously gave me his orange. The Regimental Medical Officer paid me a visit, took one look, and diagnosed jaundice. Despite my protests he ordered instant evacuation. Thus, ignominiously, ended my desert war.

DESERT REFLECTIONS

Before recounting the rigours of my evacuation, I add the following reflections on taking part in the desert campaign. Soldiers took a particular pride in fighting in the Eighth Army. For one reason, it was a famous victory, at a time when there weren’t too many of them about — except on the Eastern front where the German armies were surrendering in Stalingrad. For another, the environment of the desert lent a sense of adventure that we did not feel later in Europe. A special comradeship grew up among those of us who shared the experience. We developed a special language of our own: a vocabulary is reproduced in the Appendix. Many of the words had Arabic origins and some have entered the language permanently — bint and shufti for example. The Division's Field Cashier, who carted around the cash for our rare pay parades, was known to us as Wahid Shufti, because he had only one useful eye.