On the Shores of the Mediterranean (38 page)

Tobruk was extremely noisy too. The Germans were intent on rendering it unusable as a supply port for the Eighth Army and each afternoon Stukas, sometimes in very large numbers, would come screaming down out of the sun with their sirens going full blast and with everything in and around the harbour firing flat out at them: Bofors guns, Oerlikons, 3.7s, machine guns, rifles, rockets linked to one another with piano wire. When these raids occurred, living on board one of the MTBs, each of which was deep loaded with high octane petrol, or on their minute depot ship with the bombs roaring down into the harbour on all sides, one felt horribly exposed.

Next to being on board a ship in the harbour, one of the most exposed positions in Tobruk was occupied by what was called Navy House, the former Italian Port Office which was situated on an eminence above it. Navy House was equipped with an excellent bar which served Plymouth gin, and the naval officers who patronized it used to keep a rack of Lewis guns, stripped of their cooling jackets
to make them more manageable, in a rack in the vestibule, just as they might have left their umbrellas in the vestibule of the Naval and Military Club in London before the war. And when the Stukas were announced as ‘20 plus’ or ‘30 plus’ or whatever the number was coming in from the west up the length of the harbour, they would drain their pink gins, pick up their Lewis guns, offer their guests one if there were enough to go round and would then take to the caves in the cliffs from where they would spray away at them as they came diving in.

Now I had come back, forty-two years later, with the intention of following the course of a battle on foot, a battle that had started at six-thirty on a November morning.

It was about six forty-five, and the sun was shooting up over the edge of the desert just as it had done what now seemed long ago behind the Mukattam Hills beyond the Nile, in doing so ending our freezing vigil in the darkness among the ‘weruins’ at the Pyramids. Only now it was a blood-red sun not a golden one and it was coming up beyond the barbed wire fence, sixty miles away on the frontier between Egypt and Libya, that General Graziani built back in the thirties to keep out the gun-running camel caravans from Egypt that were supplying the Libyan Beduin with arms to fight the Italians. A fence five feet high, thirty feet wide and 250 miles long that extends from the Mediterranean to the edge of the Great Sand Sea.

It was very cold, as it always is in winter until the sun has been up for a few hours, here in what geographers and historians call the Marmaric Desert and what everyone else who has been here as a soldier or in the desert on the Egyptian side of the wire calls the Western Desert, a desert which is not really a desert but a semi-desert. This semi-desert, composed of clay or limestone dust, was now very sticky from the rain that had fallen during the last weeks. It was dotted with small tussocks of the dry, pale green
scrub called
agam
on which camels of the Beduin browse as if it was some undreamt of luxury, and with some shrubs that were something between a bush and a miniature tree, called
hillab
. In fact with this sparse vegetation apparently floating on its wet surface the desert here looked more like the Sargasso Sea than terra firma, stretching away to what appeared to be a limitless horizon, the only features in this apparently vast expanse an occasional
hillab
slightly larger than its neighbours, but in this context of near nothingness something which drew the eye.

In fact the horizon was only three miles off. Beyond it the terrain began to slope away gently downhill for another three miles or so before rising equally gradually to a low escarpment a little less than 200 feet above the sea. Along this escarpment for more than a hundred miles ran the Trigh Capuzzo, one of the old caravan routes and one of the most famous and fought-over tracks in the whole of North Africa. The place names on the Trigh Capuzzo are mostly those of wells, the tombs of Muslim holy men, or are the meeting places with other tracks, or some point that originally had few if any features at all but was one that had been chosen by a commander of one of the contesting armies as a place to hold. One of these was Knightsbridge, an eight-figure map reference (37984118) on a piece of corrugated iron supported by empty oil drums which indicated the existence of a defensive box hemmed in by wire and minefields. All these named places – Sidi Azeiz, Gasr al Areid, Bir Harig, Sidi Rezeg, El Duda, El Adem, Sidra, Knightsbridge, Sidi Muftah and Mteifel – were as well known to those who were actually fighting around them as their own native high streets and to those who survived these battles as well remembered as La Haie Sainte, Rorke’s Drift and Delville Wood had been to earlier generations of soldiers in other wars.

Here in the 4500 yards of featureless terrain between the
south-eastern perimeter of the Tobruk fortress, where we were standing, and the point where the ground begins to slope away downhill before beginning to climb again to the Trigh Capuzzo, the destruction of the 2nd Black Watch had taken place in the two hours between 6.30 and 8.30 on the morning of 20 November 1941.

Looking at it, one of the smaller of the battlefields in which the desert abounded, I felt my blood run cold. I had spoken to friends who had taken part in this battle, immediately afterwards. I had read the regimental history,
¹
and I now for the first time viewed it from the point of view of what I would probably have been if I had been present at the battle, a lieutenant commanding a platoon of perhaps thirty men.

In the simplest terms – this is not a military history – the aim was to break out from the Tobruk fortress, then surrounded by Axis forces, and to link up with the Allied armour which was sweeping up from the Egyptian frontier. The immediate aim of the Black Watch was to attack and carry an advanced German post known as Jill which was about two miles out from the perimeter across the terrain I had compared to the Sargasso Sea. Having taken it they were to carry on and take Tiger a mile further out, a very heavily defended strongpoint which was both wired and mined.

In support the Black Watch had what was generally conceded to be one of the finest gunner regiments in the British Army, the 1st Royal Horse Artillery, who had long since given up using horses to take their guns into battle, and three squadrons of a tank battalion. One squadron was to attack Tiger from the right rear and another would make the frontal assault on Jill and Tiger. Without the tanks an attack on such terrain using infantry could not possibly take place. To attempt it would be suicide. In fact,
on the morning of the attack, the tanks failed to emerge from the fortress on time and when they did, at 6.34, four minutes late, they immediately advanced in the wrong direction, north-eastwards towards Butch, another position on the left flank, which was to be attacked by the King’s Own, another British infantry regiment, instead of south-eastwards, straight ahead, towards Jill. Perhaps their commander was not altogether to blame. Enemy positions such as these were notoriously difficult to identify at a distance, even with binoculars. At this point the tanks got stuck in a minefield and four of them were blown up.

Meanwhile, B Company of the Black Watch, the company selected to take Jill, with only the memory of the hot tea and rum they had been issued with two hours previously to sustain them, set off on its two-mile advance towards it, completely unprotected in the face of heavy machine-gun fire from the Germans in Jill and also from machine guns on their left flank, which caused appalling casualties. Eventually they reached their objective and took it with the bayonet, but by the time they had succeeded in doing so they had to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. Of the five officers, three were dead, one was dying and the last was seriously wounded, and of what had been a hundred NCOs and men only eleven remained, ten men and the Company Sergeant Major, to carry on to Tiger a mile away to the south-east. This they did when the rest of the battalion came up, also unsupported by tanks, to attack it.

In and around Tiger there was the best part of a German machine-gun battalion supported by mortars and artillery and the battalion, led by its pipers, advanced into what the survivors described as being like a hailstorm, but a hailstorm of lead. Before setting off the men had been told that if they were hit they must bayonet their rifles in the ground so that the stretcher bearers could find them. Soon the field in the wake of the advance began to look as if a whole forest of rifles had been planted in it.

It was the Pipe-Major and the Pipe-Sergeant who played the battalion in on to their objectives with the regimental march,
Highland Laddie, Lawson’s Men
and the music called
The Bear
. The Pipe-Major, hit three times, after which he was taken back to a dressing station, astonished German prisoners there by continuing to play while his wounds were being dressed by a captured German doctor, in order to put heart into the other wounded.

Finally, at around 8.30 a.m., Tiger was taken with the bayonet and large numbers of prisoners with it. But at what a cost. Of the 32 officers and something over 600 men who had crossed the start line two hours previously only 8 officers and 160 men were left.

In the face of such discipline and heroism displayed by friends and comrades dead and gone, and by those who survived, I had not even the courage to ask myself if the action had been necessary at all, and if it had been necessary whether it had been worth it. Looking at the long lines of headstones in the Tobruk cemetery, which we visited on our way back, each with its beautifully carved regimental crest, a cemetery that was so magnificently kept by its Muslim custodian, I could only pray that it had been.

That same afternoon we sat in the dining room of the hotel in which we had been put up, eating a very late lunch of Libyan soup and roast chicken of which there are inexhaustible quantities in Libya and which might well, just as the meat does, come from Bulgaria, and washing it down with a strange, gaseous, nonalcoholic bright red drink called ‘Bitter’. Altogether we formed quite a mob. There was our horribly fast driver who had just admitted to having six children but was not a day over twenty-six, nothing compared with the manager of the hotel who told us he had twenty-four brothers and sisters (we didn’t ask how his mother was); there was Mr Seddik Mabruk Jedalla, the head of the Press Office in Benghazi who although he spoke very little English
managed to give us the impression that he didn’t like us; there was Mr Khalid Ziglam, our absurdly juvenile chain-smoking bodyguard with a beaky nose and a huge shock of hair, who had just showed Wanda a quantity of gold jewellery which he was carting about until an appropriate moment presented itself to give it to his ‘love’; and there was Mr Keralla and his elder brother, Mr Jedalla, both of whom were Beduin of the Shavar, a tribe whose territory is on the shores of the Mediterranean, west of Derna and north of the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain. Beautifully dressed in well-worn tweeds and anoraks, they now worked for an oil company.

‘Tell me,’ I asked Mr Jedalla, ‘why do they call this hotel the Yala? It’s a funny name for an hotel.’

‘I would rather not tell you,’ he said.

‘Oh, come on, don’t be silly!’ I said. ‘You, a Shavar Beduin, whose ancestry goes back to the Ark? What’s the world coming to?’

‘Well, you see, it wasn’t always called Yala,’ he said. ‘It used to have another name when the British used to come here when Tobruk was a military base but then, after the Revolution, the name was changed to the Yala, the Go Home British Hotel.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, ‘I can take a hint. We’re leaving tomorrow.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Mr Jedalla, ‘we should like you and your lady to stay with us for ever.’ He was genuinely shocked and upset. It was against all the established rules of Beduin hospitality.

Outside, a continuous procession of Toyotas, Nissans, Mazdas and every other sort of Japanese vehicle, plus Macks, Peugeots and a few Land Rovers, ground up the hill, driving dust through the open door into the dining room, which was decorated in an astonishing mixture of virulent shades of green, pink and yellow, adding additional layers to those which already lay within. Upstairs there were plugless bathrooms in which the water was so hot that
it came from the taps in the form of steam, and lockless lavatories hung with rusty chains that looked like medieval torture chambers that the torturers had forgotten to clear up after use. The last time I had seen such a set-up was in a hotel in Siberia, in Novosibirsk. Now we were billeted next door to one of these appalling latrines in a bedroom lit by a forty-watt bulb that was so cold that we had run the beds together and even then had had to go to bed almost fully clothed. Tobruk hadn’t changed much.

On the last evening we gave the zealous Mr Ziglam the slip and made a surreptitious tour of the town on foot. There was scarcely anyone to be seen in the streets of what was now a place with reputedly 100,000 inhabitants. It was an empty shell. What had once been the
souks
, the markets of the town, where the little shops had been which had sold all the various artefacts necessary to life in Muslim countries, the
souks
of the metal- and the wood-and the leather-workers, of the makers of clothing, the merchants selling pottery and rugs, were padlocked and closed, apparently for ever. Their place had been taken by large supermarkets set up by the Leader in which almost everything, from food to furniture, was imported. It was the same everywhere we went in Libya. With the apparently total cessation of any kind of manufactory, one trembled to think what would happen to Libya and the Libyans when the present generation of craftsmen had died off.