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There were seven of us in this truck being driven under armed Italian guard to a Benghazi POW camp. Me and six other soldiers who did not fancy being POW when the South African General in command of the Tobruk garrison in 1942 surrendered, and had followed me through a minefield to the beach of Tobruk in what proved to be vain hope of being rescued by the Navy.

After some three weeks living in caves and eating food parcels jettisoned by South African troops and building empty petrol drum rafts, we tried an overland escape only to be captured by Arab tribesmen and handed over for the bounty money on offer by the Germans.

The journey on the truck halted at the coastal small own of Derna which was a German Africa Corps depot and also sported a brothel which our guard fancied visiting.

By now our arrival had attracted numbers of a Luftwaffe unit also stationed in the depot and we were obviously something of a novelty as they surprisingly invited us to their billet huts and so began an extraordinary and amazingly convivial evening.

Coffee and rations were produced and the chat in pidgin English and sign language developed into comparing photos of family and girl friends until their ‘lights out’.

Then they found us palliasses and blankets (its cold at night in the desert) and we kipped down with the Luftwaffe. Come the morning the Italian guard returned to German jeers who turned out en-masse to wave us off. Unbelievable but true. Just a flicker of light in the darkness of War in the Western Desert in 1942.

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