大象传媒

Extract from Cliff Gascoigne's RAF memoirs, 'The Life of an Erk.'

It was not long before we started to move forward again. Travelling up and down some of those passes could be a little bit hairy, when you thought about the 1000 metre drop if you made a mistake. There was no tarmac on the tracks, the Italians had just hacked out the rock as if going to make a proper road but had been disturbed or run out of funds and had to leave it till a later date.

The idea was that we would split up and do some leap frogging. I was to take a small gang of Armourers with the advance party. I think we were somewhere near Sidi Barrani. We were attached to a part of a group consisting of about 3 aircraft from each squadron (about 12 aircraft in all). I remember three things about being there. Firstly, one of our aircraft came back from a sortie with a damaged gun turret. I went to have a look at it and was just going to climb up when someone stopped me saying, 鈥淒on鈥檛 get up there!鈥� When I asked why I was told that the gunner was in there and that his eye had been shot out and also some of his face. Secondly, we were watching a fighter Blenheim out at sea circling to come in to land, when suddenly from nowhere, we heard 鈥渂rrrp鈥� (if you can say 鈥渂rrrp鈥� - that is how long the gun burst was). The German fighter was out of his dive but the Blenheim nose-dived into the sea. From start to finish it had not taken more than 20 seconds. Finally, the third item is rather happier. One morning the Group Armament Officer came round to our place, looking terrible. I asked him if he had had a heavy night in the Mess, he replied, 鈥淚 think so.鈥� It would appear that some of the officers had tried to get Squadron Leader Gordon drunk, as he never seemed to get even slightly merry. Apparently he was on his third bottle of gin when the last of the officers (the Group Armament Officer) succumbed to the inevitable. He remembered being carried to his tent by Gordon who put him on his bed then walked away singing. The thing is you should never try to get the heir to a gin factory drunk on gin, he was probably weaned on the stuff!

The rest of the Squadron had not overtaken us but it was decided that we should move on. We left the coast and headed south right into the desert for a few miles, then turned west. We were on a well used sand track. Eventually we turned north and came to a landing ground a few miles south of Tobruk. (The siege was over by this time). We tried to pitch our tents but found that our tent pegs would not go into the ground. There was just a couple of inches of sand and then solid rock!

While we were there we celebrated Christmas Day. The Squadron always purchased enough for a very good Christmas dinner. However there had been a mix up with the rations, we had about 50 people and enough Christmas pudding for 300. The rest of the squadron had all the turkey etc. Our Christmas dinner was bully beef and vegetables and as much Christmas pudding as we could manage. Fortunately, we did see the funny side of it and expected to have Christmas pudding every day for the next week or so.

Just after Christmas we moved to Tobruk 鈥榙rome. Near to where we pitched our tent, there were some soldiers, two officers and three privates who were resting after the siege. We became quite friendly and they told us their story. They were Terratorials, members of an Edinburgh ack-ack unit. Their ship had been going to Egypt through the Mediterranean, but when opposite Tobruk turned south into the harbour. On disembarking they were lined up and the person in charge told then to remove their topees and throw them into the sea. They were then told to put on their tin hats as that would be their headdress from now on. One day, one of the soldiers showed me a photograph, I asked if it was his younger brother as the picture looked like someone 15 years younger. He said, 鈥淣o, that is me 6 months ago when we came here.鈥�

There was a dump of sorts a couple of miles away, which we were told had some second hand boots. Ours were getting well worn and we had no stores on our detachment, so we went there and acquired some very comfortable boots.

An army unit across the road moved out one day, so some of the chaps in our tent went across almost before they had gone. The rule was that when someone moved out, you went and scavenged to see if they had left anything useful. This time we were very lucky, to our amazement they brought back some bread. Some was OK but a lot of it was mildewed. They also had half a sack of what looked like sliced dehydrated potatoes. They were! We found that if we soaked them for a couple of hours, let them dry for a while, then fried them, you could have crisps!

We did alright for booze at Tobruk. A wagon was sent 100 miles to get stores for the canteen from the NAAFI depot. Everybody thought that we were going to have a well stocked canteen and we did, if you liked beer! It was being sold from the back of the truck in cases of 12 bottles and was selling fast. It seems this was all they had at the NAAFI depot, apart from some toothpaste and soap.

Having read all this talk of booze you may think we were a load of drunks. We did our share of drinking, but please remember that we had got little else to do. We could not nip out to the cinema or go shopping. There was nothing except tents and a lot of sand, and sand doesn鈥檛 have very much flavour or any liquid content to quench thirsts as we found out when there was a sand storm. We did not see a concert party or have any of the stars come to entertain us until the war in the middle east was over. The troops at the other side of North Africa had Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan there but they would be too busy looking after their artillery pieces to bother too much with entertainment. So the only thing to do was have a few bevvies regularly to ease the monotony.

漏 Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.