大象传媒

Most of us know nowadays, from numerous wild-life television programmes, that the desert is anything but devoid of animal life and I certainly learnt this at first hand. The first that comes to mind is the scorpion whose sting though not deadly can be very painful and we did try to remember to turn our boots upside down every morning before putting them on. Then there were large black beetles that soldiers sometimes matched in combat with scorpions. This was done by putting the combatants in a metal tray formed by cutting down a four gallon petrol tin. The beetle nearly always won because its carapace seemed impervious to the scorpion鈥檚 attack, whereas the scorpion was destroyed when the beetle cut off its sting with it fearsome looking nippers. A tiny rodent, the jerboa rat, identifiable by the tuft on the end of its tail, gave rise to the divisional sign of the 7th Armoured Division; the original 鈥楧esert Rats鈥�. Finally, and I don鈥檛 think I was seeing things, I was driving along a desert track one day when an English red fox ran across the track in front of me. Well if it wasn鈥檛 a fox it was as near to one as you could get.

I had only been at Gambut for a few weeks when the Germans attacked our forward troops and a raging tank battle ensued some miles to the west of us. The aircraft pulled out and we, with other units, formed into a defensive square with the guns in the middle and the infantry on the perimeter. Fortunately we weren鈥檛 there very long and soon received orders to retire to the East. Thus began what proved to be the long slow retreat back to Egypt. I was put in charge of the convoy of GL (radar) equipment which because they were slow moving were always at the tail of the column and usually left miles behind. This was because the very delicate radar equipment was housed in box like cabins on wheels with axles that were entirely unsprung. Push the speed at all and you were likely to finish up with a cabin full of broken valves and equipment that was entirely out of action. Such was the state of the terrain we had to cross, to say nothing of the potholed coastal road, that we had to proceed very slowly and sometimes at little more than walking pace. We hadn鈥檛 gone very far on the first day when dusk fell and I decided to pull off onto some hard ground and laager for the night, because driving in the dark, without lights, along a narrow tarmac strip, with patches of soft sand on either side was pretty hazardous. Just before dark when there wasn鈥檛 a sound and no other troops in sight I was about to climb into my sleeping bag when I heard a staff car coming down the road from the direction of Tobruk at the rate of knots. I鈥檒l never know what made me go to the side of the road, but I did and flagged the car down. The passenger was an R.A.S.C Major who wound his window down and said 鈥淲hat the hell are you doing?鈥� I replied that I was about to go to bed whereupon he exploded and said 鈥淵ou bloody fool. Don鈥檛 you know that Jerry is practically level with us on the Trig Cappuzzo, about five miles to the south?鈥� Of course I had had no way of knowing this so off we set again and travelled all night to catch up with the guns early next morning on the Egyptian border at Fort Capuzzo. I have often thought since that if I had not stopped that car we would have woken up in the morning behind the enemy lines, would have gone into the 鈥楤ag鈥� and spent the rest of the War as prisoners.

We were relieved to be with the rest of the Battery again and from then on managed to keep with them. Our last action before getting back to the Nile delta was when we were defending a rail-head just west of Sidi Barrani, but from then on it was a daily retreat to the east. A particularly memorable day was when we got stuck in soft sand on the edge of the Qattara Depression, a sand sea that is quite impassable to all but the lightest of vehicles and it took us the whole day to travel no more than five miles, because we had to drag every gun forward through the sand on its winch cable. Then the gun tower, a large vehicle with the chassis of a London bus, would churn its way forward to the length of its cable and haul the gun in again. The Qattara depression by the way is where the Eighth Army finally made its stand because the negotiable desert narrowed to a distance of about twenty miles with the sea on its northern flank and the sand sea on its southern flank. We, however, plugged on eastwards until one day we climbed to the top of a ridge and there laid out before us was the verdant green of the valley of the Nile whereas, an about turn showed the vista of endless desert that had been my lot for the previous several weeks.

Oh how we nourished the thought of a bath at Mena House, the hotel that was an oasis of comfort and luxury beside the Giza Pyramids.

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