大象传媒

Continuing the personal account of Operation Bughole writain by it's commanding officer, Captain Cornelius Turner.

The following day we looked around the town of maybe 5000 souls. It had a sort of primitive Tirolean character, the houses in natural unpainted timber, roofs of shingles or corrugated iron. A couple of iron minaret towers reminded us that the older inhabitants had been Turkish subjects. There were no shops, nothing to sell, rations of meat, potatoes and flour were daily distributed. Milk was for children only. There was no cheese, no beer, no wine, no tea, coffee or cocoa, no salt or yeast, no fruit, no lard, no butter to be found. Every meal, three good meals a day, was a bowl of steak and turnip soup with unleavened dry bread and water. The source of the steak could be anything on four legs and for five weeks we kept very fit on it though the water wore us down a bit. There were a few carts in the town, but no transport or access beyond the edge of town except by pack animals, ponies, mules or on foot.

Our sergeants McCulloch, Newman, Morrison, Hill and McMillan were billeted together at the northern edge of the town and I was just across the road with three other officers who were part of the resident Military Mission. They had a sergeant and half a dozen signallers not far away, and elsewhere the Yanks had a Colonel with enough staff for two good poker schools. These missions had real jobs besides bridge and poker - the collection of baled-out aircrews and liaison with Cairo and Bari to arrange arms drops and such. Night after night we would lie out in the hillside, curled up in holes we'd dug to get out of the bitter winds, our straw fires laid out beside us, the signallers trying to make their homing beacons work. If we heard the unmistakable drone of the C47s we would race to put a light to them, to show the recognition code letter of the day. A couple of times there were men on the parachutes. They stayed a day collecting a guide and pack animal, then disappeared into the forest bound for Greece, Romania, Hungary or Austria to live out a hazardous and lonely war in some outpost of resistance.

In the first week we had the glider incident. There'd been a daily machine-gunning by patrolling J.U.88s and I got together with the local Drugs and arranged for them to provide ponies to pull the gliders into the forest edge where they could be more thoroughly hidden from the air. Besides, we'd heard at our briefing that the Krauts had some gliders of their own 50 miles away at Bihac, and with ours standing out on the snow like a sore thumb they might be tempted to start something. OK said the Drugs. Ponies come tomorrow said their interpreter. But of course they didn't. It was the usual Latin "Manana." Having been met with stupid grins instead of ponies for several days, I grew steadily more purple in the face. Our own people were just as amused and that didn't help. "You'll be lucky" said they. Well we'd see. The next morning I went down with Sgt. Hill and saw the local Commandant, and I deliberately and clearly let him know that if the gliders were not moved by midday following I would set fire to them. "OK," he said. "Ponies come!"

It was a glorious morning as Sgt Hill and I plodded out to the L.Z., and there the gliders lay just as they had landed. A bunch of Drugs supposedly guarding them sat round the fire just inside the tree line. Claude must have thought I looked a bit grim. "Can we really do it?" he asked, but I was already tearing the flying instruments out and stabbing at the canvas with Claude鈥檚 knife and holding a match against the frayed ends. For a few seconds there was not enough smoke for the Drugs to notice from their fireside. Then in a bluster of wind the fire jumped the length of the fuselage, and as the Drugs ploughed through the snow towards us it was just a matter of standing back from the heat. While they were shouting and arguing among themselves, I turned to Claude, "Come on!" and started towards the next glider. The argument dissolved into silence for a moment, then pandemonium broke loose. "No, no, no!" they yelled. "We get ponies!" One or two rifles went off presumably into the air; "Ponies come now" they said, barring our way. In fact they were standing there all the time, harnessed to the Drugs sleighs, and in half an hour, before the ashes of my glider were cold, the other two were safely tucked away among the trees. As I felt the ashes, I thought of the men who had sweated to make my glider in Texas and Oregon, the GI's who had put it together at Casablanca, how we had flown it across deserts, seas and mountains, sun and blizzard a thousand miles and more. We didn't have much to say as we trudged home, Claude carrying the instruments, I still cooling off.

No-one else said much. The Drugs stepped back a bit, out of our way. Our own flock looked a bit keenly at me and stayed out of it. I think I must risk boring you with a word or two about guerrilla warfare, about Partisans. Churchill had said we would fight in the beaches and streets, in the fields and the hills - fine words but I'm glad it was never necessary. The serials on the telly, tell brave tales of the intrepid local school-masters and grocers, risking their all for love of country and no doubt many did and are still doing, somewhere. But real guerrilla warfare is not so simple. When gold, your actual golden sovereigns, start falling out of the sky, closely followed by rifles, grenades and the honeyed praises of idiotic liberal politicians, what else could possibly happen but that every cheap racketeer, every bully, everyone with a score to settle, every layabout slob will suddenly sit up and look smartly round for a piece of the action. In Yugoslavia as in France, Italy and Greece, the scum of the earth rose readily to the surface.

Many of the Drugs were just playing at soldiers. Not to overstate the case against them, they were tough and fit, able to do a good boy-scout act in their forests. If they were hungry they only had to kick down the door of some isolated cottage where some terrified woman would give them all the food she had. Then as now, the silly young girls were hanging round the necks of their cardboard heroes. But, as in all countries, there were many sterling characters, and the country was by a miracle granted an inspiring leader, perhaps the greatest leader and the most perceptive politician in Europe. Out of a country on the brink of anarchy and despair Tito created a power in world politics, a civilised, contented people. He was a wonderful man.

I met him just the once. It was a long day鈥檚 pony trek to his H.Q. at Jaice. Fitzroy Maclean was there, leading the Allied mission with Randolph Churchill, rather an extrovert character, drinking vodka and throwing out bets that he'd climb the local peak against anyone for a tenner. Still he had the right spirit, easily the eldest of us, asking for no concessions, standing his corner in a parachute drop as well as at the table. He took me in to see the great man. He was the sort you met once or twice in a lifetime, Magnetic, Popski was like that; I think Bader must have been. Medium height, fortyish, a dark square man, unsmiling, keen eyes fixed at you. There was an interpreter beside him.

"You burned the glider!" he said abruptly.
"Yes Sir! I'm sorry"
"Why?" he leaned forward.

I had no hesitation in shopping his minions at Petrovac. 鈥淚t was the only way I could think of to get them moved", I answered. I gave him an account of the whole thing, but he raised his hand to cut me short and briefly glanced aside before fixing his eyes on me again. "It was a pity, but you did well; give my thanks to your pilots."
I saluted and walked out, but I have never forgotten those few minutes and those blazing eyes.

The days did not drag. I spent quite a deal of time learning Serbo-Croat. Two of the Mission officers had a primer and they practised translating the exercises from English, while I tried to translate back without cribbing the answer. These fellows were of a predictable pattern. Their unit at Bari was known as 133 Force. I gathered there were similar units in plenty in London, Cairo, Algiers, all the same in essentials. The Cloak and Dagger brigades. Liaison with resistance groups everywhere was their job and of course many of them; male and female, were leading hazardous lives and suffering tortured deaths but our lot were not all that impressive. The British were invariably Oxbridge men, from the same public schools, from the same prep. schools even. Not too bright as scholars and less so as soldiers. But I could not help recognising that they had a kind of style, an inability to recognise or acknowledge danger, an enviable free-masonry, a casual sloppy way of approaching difficulties that all too often actually worked. They were like actors underplaying a part. Soldiering was an amateur game as far as officers were concerned; the sergeants were the pros. They pulled my leg quite a bit and behind my back called me the Cock Pheasant. At my school we had never been taught that if you happen to excel at anything it isn't supposed to show.

Just one night I went out into the woods with about ten of the Drugs, a couple of them girls. We called at two or three forest huts. Crossed an open road, timber close on either side, no traffic. It was easier going under the trees where the snow was thinner, but the walking was very exhausting. Sometime in the middle of the night we all rested at a large hut in a ravine where we had a delicious fry-up. Like real bacon. Towards dawn, exhausted and foot-sore in my clumsy flying boots, I was glad when they broke into song the signal that we were nearly home. It was nice. The British Army never sang, not spontaneously on the march as they did in the Great War. It harked back to ,my childhood, listening in the dark of a Saturday night to the harmony that distance lends to the singing of tipsy men homeward bound.

My billet was very comfortable. A farmhouse on the edge of town, its ground floor was devoted to the cows and two ponies and a store of hay and turnips. A ladder led to the central upstairs landing from which the living and bedrooms led off. The cattle helped to keep it warm and it was scrupulously clean, and no fleas! The head of the house was our landlady, a good-looking sturdy woman of around 50. After we'd been there about five weeks I began to sense that I was overdue for a bath. I wasn't looking forward to it in the freezing conditions, but took my little tin wash bowl for a fill of water, set it down in the middle of the floor and stripped off. I was just pondering on the modus operandi as I could only get one foot at a time in the bowl when up went the wooden hatch and in came the good lady with an armful of bedding. She stopped on the threshold as I grabbed my towel, dropped the bedding, raised her hands with a little "Woopsie" and shot off out again. I'd no sooner closed the door and set my towel aside when in she came again, this time trundling a half-barrel washtub which she spun handily to a standstill beside me. Next journey she struggled in with a three gallon pail of hot water, steaming beautifully. She then emptied my tin bowl into the tub and motioned to me to follow it, and before I could blink, snatched my towel away and set about me. She had a kind of cocoa-matting hand scrubber and I swear she went over me every inch with it. There was no time for embarrassment. It was agony! I was sure I could feel the skin peeling off my back. She had to crouch down while emptied a bowl of water over my head, then stand up again while she poured more over my shoulders. Only then did she stand back, arms akimbo, to look at her handiwork. Then with a nod and a smile she picked up my towel, flung it at me and went. Bless her! The day we went I gave her my last tablet of soap that I'd been hoarding and she held it lovingly against her cheek and tearfully bobbed her thanks. Within a month the Germans were to re-occupy the town and manys the time over the years I've thought of my brave little landlady and hoped they did her no harm. Her kind, in any country, anytime, are the salt of the earth. Don't talk to me about partisans!

Well, that's about all there is to say about Bunghole. We'd watched the snow shrinking in the lovely March weather. We'd been the first aircraft in and five weeks later we were in the first aircraft out. Air Commodore Whitney Strought, a famous multi-millionaire Grand Prix racing driver of those days, brought in his C47 and then, after throwing out everything detachable, seats, parachutes, doors, all our kit and arms, he took it off again, bumping desperately over the uneven hillside, still covered with nearly a foot of snow, to lift off at the last second to brush through the tree-tops to turn south for Italy. Two hours later we tumbled out half frozen at Bari.

I still had to face a debriefing at 133 Force, but I thought we'd done pretty well. I got a real snotty-nosed Yes Minister type. I'd lived in my clothes for over a month and was not feeling ready to be looked up and down as if I'd been a bad smell. Well he needn't have made it quite so obvious.
"What have you got to say about that glider? The Drugs are furious because it was theirs after you landed. The Americans are mad because it was theirs before that, and I'm annoyed because I've had to tear up the court-martial papers I'd got out for you."
He quite took the wind out of my sails. All I could think of to say was, 鈥淲ould that be because the glider had never been theirs anyway?鈥�
"Don't be impertinent" he snapped. "We've torn up your recommendation and you can think yourself lucky!"
I turned my back on him and walked out. Bugger 'em I thought. At any rate, after I'd cooled down I put Sergeants Andy McCulloch and Jock Morrison (the other two pilots) in for DFMs and they came through a week or two later.
It was a warm spring afternoon as I walk through the olive groves and vines to the farmhouse Mess back at Comiso. Robbie Coulthard and Teddy Hain were snoring their lunch down. It transpired there'd been a reported crash over Split the day we'd gone in and somehow I'd got mixed up with this other poor sod and been posted missing a month back. However it was all exaggerated as they say so we opened up the bar and some of the Yanks looked in and the Pathfinders and that was that. Opening my mail I learned that Chris had been born a week before I left, and was already six weeks old, luckily there'd been just enough doubt about that crash for them to hang on for confirmation so there was no harm done at home. But just then, Comiso felt like home and it felt good to be back.

Postscript
My father, Captain Turner, came through the war unscathed and died in 1989, aged 76.

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