大象传媒

Flight to Heliopolis Part Two

We become guests of the Indian Army

It was still quite early in the day as the two of us walked inland. There were 2 or 3 miles of greenish, bushy country rising slightly from the coast, a break in the low hills, some semi-agricultural country which petered out into scrubby desert. We found a track going more or less east and kept on all day. We had no compass but judged our direction reasonably well by the sun. We had no food or water. About four in the afternoon we had been on the go for about 32 hours and had just about reached that state of tiredness of body and mind when it becomes easier to keep plodding along than to make a rational decision and I do not think we had yet appreciated that it would soon be dark. Any decision of what we should do, knowing that we seemed not to be getting anywhere, was taken from us when a truck appeared, coming slowly in our direction. When it was about 400 yards away we could see there were two soldiers in it. They had a machine gun mounted on the bonnet and fired two shots over our heads. We put our hands up as we had seen it done on the films, and stood still. We had been shot at. This was where the real war was. My heart, I remember well, was beating very rapidly. As they came up close we could see that they were wearing khaki battle-dress and khaki turbans.

They were Sikhs, quite obviously, even to us. We had just been rescued, in fact, by the 4th Indian Division of the 8th Army. I have always remembered things well up to this point but now my memory becomes very fragmented. I must have gone straight off to sleep in the back of the truck and then have a vague impression of a Company Sergeant Major, and a large tin mug being put into my hand. It was filled with the most delicious liquid. I think it must have been water heavily diluted with something quite strong because when I woke up some 12 hours later it took me a while to get a grip on the situation. I was lying in a huge bath let into the floor of a large and empty room. The walls, floor and the bath itself were covered with tiny blue tiles. It was quite magnificent - like something out of The Arabian Nights. It was, in fact, the bathroom of a third floor apartment in a large block of flats in the small Italian-built town of Barce, but I wasn't to know that as I woke up. There was hustle and bustle all around and I found the rest of the crew scattered about the floor of another room. They looked just about as shattered as I felt. The army had, it seemed, gone off to find them the previous evening. They, the army that is, didn't know what to do with us but looked after us well. They had their own problems which we had not immediately been aware of. It seemed Benghazi had maybe not been taken after all, or if it had, not for very long.

We had a look around Barce. This did not take long but what there was, was not unattractive. A main street of tall imposing Italian-looking buildings, undamaged, no water, no electricity, occupied by our army this week, two weeks ago by the German army, and, not that we knew it at that particular moment, soon by them again. The buildings were magnificent inside, nothing spoiled, no graffiti. This part of what is now Libya, but then called Cyrenaica, had been occupied by the Italians in 1932 after 6 years of warfare against the Libyan Arab leaders. It was really quite extraordinary after more than two years of war that they had not, to say the least, been occupied or despoiled in some way or other. It is possible that we had stumbled upon an area that neither army had come across.

An encounter on the road to Alex

On the morning of the 25th January, (we had been there a week), there was chaos. The main street of Barce was thick with two lines of army vehicles all heading towards Alexandria. We watched this for a while and gathered there was a retreat going on. This raised the question; do we get a lift and join it or get back to the aircraft (somehow) and burn it (not that it probably would burn, there was no fuel in it). If we did we would then quite possibly, if not probably, be taken prisoner. Though I have often wondered what we would have done the choice was denied us because, and it was just as if Aladdin had rubbed his lamp, another small miracle happened. In a temporary traffic jam in the bottleneck of Barce鈥檚 main street we spotted a small tanker with 鈥楽.A.A.F.鈥� written on it. There was only the (South African) driver. We asked him had he got any aircraft fuel? 鈥淐ertainly鈥�, he said, 鈥淲hy do you ask?鈥� 鈥� or words to that effect.

He had, it appeared, about 200 gallons and would be pleased to be relieved of it. He had come from Benina airfield near Benghazi from where his squadron鈥檚 own aircraft had long since gone and from where he himself had got away just in time. Jerry couldn鈥檛 be all that far off, he said. However, he was more than willing to postpone his personal retreat and accepted our story that we had an aircraft 30 miles away on the coast which might be coaxed off the ground. We all got onto the tanker and with more luck than judgement, perhaps, not only found it, but found it just as we had left it, a slightly incongruous object in that particularly remote setting 鈥� and rather extraordinary that a patrolling Jerry fighter hadn鈥檛 seen it as it was sitting there on the beach presumably visible for miles.

Because of some technical hitch with the tanker we could only fill the aircraft tanks on each wing by using a funnel and putting 4 gallons in at a time from a can. This was slow going and by early afternoon we had only put about 30 gallons in each tank. The two pilots decided, as it would be dark before long, to try to take off as things were, land at Barce and the rest of the crew to go back on the tanker. The take-off had to be seen to be believed. Personally, I had rated their chances as nil. But undoubtedly another miracle was about to happen, for, after some fierce revving of the engines to pull itself out of the ruts it had dug for itself in the sand when we came to a stop, it was able to be turned round to take off in the opposite direction to which we had landed and then, with about 20 degrees of flap and given full throttle it swayed this way and that way, hit bumps, bounced violently several times, one final time, and quite incredulously became airborne. Fortunately it had no weight in it or the undercarriage would never have stood it. Barnes Wallis, designer of the Wellington, would have been proud. We met up again on Barce airfield, put our heads down in the aircraft as it was now virtually dark and transferred the rest of the fuel the next morning. We thanked our more-than-helpful South African as effusively as the occasion merited. He went on his way, our hero, quite cheerfully as though this sort of thing was all in the day鈥檚 work. It was probably not his first retreat.

Getting into the aircraft we thought we could hear some gunfire, faintly, in the distance. It was undoubtedly time to be on our way. Having already said goodbye and 鈥榯hanks鈥� to the Indian Army who had taken us under their wing for a week, we got ourselves off the ground without further ado and headed easterly for Cairo. It seemed quite pleasant again to be masters of our own destiny.

And now the mother of all sand-storms

We had not, however, bargained for quite a nasty 3 陆 hr flight to Mersa Matruh. (This was, in fact, such a violent storm that it is recorded in various accounts of the desert war that activity on the ground, let alone in the air on both sides was virtually nil). This was the only time I can recall flying in such awful conditions. The bumping was violent and we couldn鈥檛 get over the thick sandy cloud so we just had to grin and hear it and plough through it. For the first and only time in my life I was air-sick and brought everything up. Fortunately I just made it to the Elsan down the back of the aircraft.

Once again we became preoccupied with the fuel gauges. If we had, as we calculated at Barce, put about 200 gallons in the tanks as we had thought, then there was not much margin for error. Once again fate was on our side. Quite suddenly there was a small clearance in the storm and we could see the ground. And there was Mersa, just below us.

We over-nighted there and thankfully the next morning was bright and clear. We walked out to where we had parked our aeroplane and apart from losing some paint here and there and a layer of dust over everything inside it seemed alright. We had taken the precaution of parking with the nose pointing down-wind to keep as much sand as possible of the air intakes under the engines.

The 2 hr flight to Helopolis airport in Cairo was an anti-climax after all this. We landed, taxied to where there was another Wellington parked and got out. Our Wellington, registered number DV419, had been delivered. We had become quite fond of it and looked upon it as our own and flown it about 3500 miles in 28 陆 hours spread over 24 days. It was still in one piece, still as good as new. We felt quite proud of ourselves. We found somebody. The skipper said that we had just brought this aircraft from England and here was the logbook.鈥漅ight, mate鈥� he said 鈥淚鈥檒l take that鈥�. And that was that.

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