大象传媒

This was written by my late father, George Edward Whiting, about his experiences in North Africa during 1943.

On the 13th May 1943 we moved to a new position, near the sea and the very next day we were in swimming. It was slightly fresh but we enjoyed ourselves. There was a lifeboat beached there, which the Germans had abandoned after trying to get away, and we had some fun with it. Later on that day we received air letters to send home and I wrote one to Vi and one to Mum, assuring them I was safe after all. For four days we had a thorough rest getting plenty of swimming and sunbathing in. I wrote letters to Fred and Artie and a long ordinary letter to Vi, all about what I had been doing.
Then our battery moved back to Hammen Lif, to rejoin the rest of the regiment. From then on the 鈥渂ull鈥� started. Tents had to be lined in neat rows, kit laid out outside, brasses polished, and God forbid, self-propelled guns lined up to precision with a director.
In a binary tent for two I slept with Bing Corsby and we were issued with mosquito nets to sleep under and we started taking mepachrine tablets for prevention of malaria. A victory parade was held on the 20th May in Tunis. Volunteers were asked for, but few came forward so the correct number were detailed. To compensate for all this, we had the afternoons off and being near the sea were most of the time down there. The weather began to get very warm about now and the sea looked very blue with the town of Tunis on our left and the large jutting out of Cape Bon on our right. No peacetime English seaside resort could have had so many bathers as was in the sea each afternoon. As far as eye could see there were soldiers bathing. Of course there were no women like on an English resort, for most men had no bathing trunks, so it seemed like a nudist colony. It was good to be with ones friends again to lie about and to have no qualms as to anything likely to come back at us to disturb. What else happened? We received congratulations from the 6th Armoured Div for the performance we put up while with them. A large victory service was held on the Sunday in the camp area. I refused to go, sticking to my vow not to go again until the war was ended. It seemed wrong to me for them to be singing hymns such as 鈥淔ight the good fight鈥� in times like these. And how was it possible for a man to adhere to the Ten Commandments?
While here we had a sad tragedy. While cleaning a rifle a shot was accidentally fired and Ken Ashton was hit in the chest. After coming safely through the campaign and only just letting his wife know he was safe and then getting hit by an accident was very bad luck. He died before they could get him to a hospital.
There was a rota run for visits to Tunis, which was about half an hour鈥檚 truck ride from Hammen Lif. My turn came on May 25th on Dad鈥檚 birthday. On the way down we passed St Germain again and I saw it was converted into a huge prison camp. There were literally thousands there. Along further were the thousands of German and Italian vehicles we had captured and further still was a big park of captured enemy guns. It was good to see. We passed Tunis airfield with German aircraft with black swastikas still on them. The RAF had arrived and there were plenty of British fighters on the drome. Arriving at Tunis we were surprised to see the accuracy of the British bombing. The harbour area was completely smashed up, but the town itself was intact. There was nothing to buy in Tunis except iced drinks or wine and I found the iced drinks were very good. I had gone with Bill Nyberg and another chap from the troop, but as usual Bill would wander up the street and see nothing. We lost him several times. We saw a queue of soldiers lining up for what we thought was a cinema, but it turned out after asking several of them that it was a brothel, so we detached ourselves. Bill remarked 鈥淗ow much farther in this civilised world have we progressed from the animal stage,鈥� and we both answered him with 鈥淣ot much.鈥� There was a Ensa show in the town, the one thing we had come for really, but when we reached the theatre, a fair place with the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack flying outside, we discovered a queue long enough to fill the theatre three times. So we gave it up as a bad job and continued strolling. It was a treat to see the well-dressed French people strolling up and down the main street. Their clothes were every shade of colour. The dirty Arabs intermingled with them and the khaki of the soldiers, British and American, filled in the gaps. We saw a French funeral in an elaborate hearse with the driver and coachmen in cocked hats and the white horses with huge headpieces of tall feathers.
There were many drunken soldiers, sampling for their first time the French wine which was very potent. In the evening a French Morocco army band played in the centre of the main street and we stayed to listen to it until it was time for the truck to leave. The band ended its concert by playing the Marsellaise; the American anthem and God Save the King. That was my visit to Tunis. I had seen enough of it in one day and had no wish to go there again. Of course later on they got it more organised with NAAFIs and cinemas, but when we saw it they had hardly recovered from the change over from German to Allied troops.
I was having some nasty bouts of extreme sickness while we were staying there. And as we were taking two lots of tablets a day, a white one and a yellow one, I had a few nights of sickness before I pinned it down to the thing that was causing it. The white tablets were concentrated vitamins or in lieu of oranges and the yellow ones were mepachrine tablets for prevention of malaria. I finally pinned it down to the mepachrines and stopped taking them. These were issued and had to be taken on a muster parade so I had to pretend swallowing them whilst slipping them into my pocket to throw away later on. They were horrible things to taste in your mouth and if you accidentally left in the pocket of your khaki drill when you washed your clothes it dyed them a bright yellow. Later on it became an offence not to take them so I had to go to the MO. He advised me to start taking them again for my own good and suggested I divided the small tablet into four and take a quarter at a time and then to build up later on to a full tablet. I did this and after one or two bouts of sickness I was able finally to take a full sized tablet without any ill effects. I was rather glad later on for quite a number of chaps contracted malaria and I certainly didn鈥檛 want that.
We had our first sample of the sirocco or dust storms here. On a perfectly sunny day the wind got up and dark clouds appeared in the sky, not rains clouds, but dust. Before long the sun was just an orange glow in the sky before being finally blotted out and dust was blowing in everywhere. Everything was covered with dust, tents, blankets, mess tins, and even the tea and meals had a coating of it before you could drink or eat it.
It was beginning to get very hot during the day, but except for the spit and polish we had an easy time here getting each afternoon off to go swimming and to get out of the heat. Even at night with a moon shining and the frogs croaking it was lovely to walk along the seashore.
On the 1st of June, we packed up and put the carriers on transporters and started the long journey to a cooler spot for the rest of the summer. On the first day鈥檚 journey we went through Hamman Lif with the Bay of Tunis palace deserted this time. St Germain with its huge prisoner of war cages empty now with the prisoners gone back farther. Mediyary el Bab, scene of a big battle with minefields everywhere was still a shambles and we stayed the night somewhere between Le Krib and Le Kef. The second day we went through Le Kef, Tebebsa and stayed the night at Ain Beda. On the third day we arrived at our destination Ain Abessa, some ten miles from the fair sized town of Setif. We were situated on the side of a hill between two high ranges of mountains and the first thing we noticed was that the entire camping area was covered with locusts. As you walked through the scrub, they rose in swarms and our boots squelched as many were squashed. They were four inches long, like a grasshopper with wings and spent their time eating the greenstuff and mating. No organised attempt to shoo them away was successful and it was only when every piece of edible greenstuff had been eaten did they move to new fields.
We put up our own bivvys again in regimental lines of course and I again slept with Bing. It was hot here, but being on a hill and high up we were not as hot as we found it in lower places. Flies were a curse and meals were eaten only with frantic windmill motions of the arms to keep the flies off. If they bit you they drew blood, our skin being much tenderer than the Arabs who seemed to tolerate the flies settling on them. One Arab I saw actually had a fly in the corner of each eye and he let them feed there. A result of these flies was the prevalence of diarrhoea in the regiment or dysentery as it should be called and the MO was kept busy with these cases. The latrine orderly was the most important person in the camp these days for there were flytraps over the lavatories to prevent spreading of the disease.
The regiment started trips to Setif but my first trip there was as a regimental policeman. I rather liked the look of the town, as North African towns go it was good. I was able to buy some tomatoes and cherries. It had two parks, so me and the other policeman I was with sat down in the cool of the park, instead of looking for trouble around the wine bars in the main street. We had strict orders from the military police that anyone seen in the brothel area was to be taken into custody. We weren鈥檛 looking for any trouble, so we didn鈥檛 look anywhere near this area and although I went to Setif many times afterwards I never did know where the brothel area was.
Two days later I had my own half-day in Setif and we went down to it by truck. There was a large, nearly new dance hall and the Church Army had made it into a canteen. French women served behind the counter and tea and cakes could be bought. The tea was served in earthenware bowls instead of cups, and a radio and sometimes a band supplied music. It was pleasantly cool in there and we spent most of our time there supping tea. We walked all through Setif seeing everything, the shops with their depleted stocks in the windows, the bars with the small coloured chairs and tables on the pavements. The parks where gaily dressed women and children mingled with the exotic colours of the flowers, the NAAFI with its Arab waiters and the usual tasting tea and finally the filthy back streets of the Arab quarter contrasting with the milk white villas of the French people. I bought postcards of Setif, hair pins for Vi and some scent and powder. I sampled a wine bar and drank a couple of glasses of muscatel wine with ice in it. Then finally the truck back to camp with its usual drunk people and the inevitable singsong, sickness and fights, in that order. So started our long stay at Ain Abbessa, which lasted until December.

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