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HISTORY

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AFRICAN TRILOGY

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ALAN MOOREHEAD

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AFRICAN TRILOGY

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COMPRISING

MEDITERRANEAN FRONT A YEAR OF BATTLE THE END IN AFRICA

A personal account of the three years’ struggle against the Axis in the Middle East and North Africa, 1940-3

With a Foreword by FIELD-MARSHAL VISCOUNT WAVELL G.C.B., C.M.G., M.C.

HAMISH HAMILTON LONDON

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First Published . December 1944

Reprinted . January 1945

Reprinted January 1946

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PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., LONDON AND EDINBURGH

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FOREWORD N

By FIELD-MARSHAL VISCOUNT WAVELL, G.C.B., C.M.G., M.C.

Mr. Alan Moorehead has asked me to write a foreword to his trilogy on the African Campaign, in which he and I once or twice shared air travel and experiences.

North Africa has been one of the great battle-grounds of history. Rome and Carthage there decided their long drawn out contest for Nthe Empire of the Mediterranean — the world of their day. One of the most famous commanders of history, Scipio, won in that struggle his title of Africanus. Another, Belisarius, there fought one of his most spectacular campaigns. Later, the Mohammedan hosts, in the burning fire of their new faith, swept along those shores, though no one seems to know quite why or how. Two of the world’s conquering heroes, Alexander and Napoleon, established themselves in the Egyptian base, but then turned eastwards instead of westwards.

Alexander got as far as Siwa indeed, but, after some rather mysterious communing with the divine in that remote oasis, decided that his fate lay in India. Napoleon was also lured eastwards, largely, I suspect, by the star of Alexander ; I have sometimes wondered whether that ambitious schemer ever considered a return to France by way of Algiers, as the conqueror of North Africa.

North Africa has at all times been a land of petty warfare, skirmishes and frontier raids. Much blood has been shed in those obliterating sands. In the campaigns of which Mr. Moorehead writes, the Long Range Desert Group and the Commandos carried on the same guerrilla tradition.

It was in accordance with the fitness of history that North Africa should have been the scene of a great struggle in the greatest of all wars. That struggle has all the qualities of an epic drama — three stirring Acts, a tense ebb and flow of fortune, and the final triumph of right in a v spectacular victory.

„ A contemporary account can never be the final record of a campaign.

■ The plans of the leaders and the limitations in which they worked are ' not fully known. But — though estimates and judgments of events and persons may have to be revised — it is in many respects the truest tale, if truly seen and told, since it gives the human factors that are so often overlooked when the cold, critical official histories come to be written.

HISTORY

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FOREWORD

Alan Moorehead is an accurate observer of events, a shrewd judge of persons and tendencies, and an attractive writer. His three volumes will be of great interest now while events are fresh, and of value to future historians as a human background for their impassive record.

WAVELL

New Delhi, March 1944.

PREFACE

By ALAN MOOREHEAD

The war in Africa and the Middle East fell naturally into three phases, each lasting twelve months.

At first General Wavell had command from 1940 to 1941, and that was the year of tremendous experiments, of thrusting about in the dark ; the year of bluff and quick movement when nobody knew what was going to happen. Whole armies and fleets were flung about from one place to another, and in its frantic efforts to find a new equilibrium the Middle East erupted at half a dozen places at once.

At one stage Wavell had five separate campaigns on his hands — the Western Desert, Greece, Crete, Italian East Africa and Syria — and there were other side-shows like Iraq and British Somaliland as well. Most of this was essentially colonial warfare carried out with small groups of men using weapons that would be regarded as obsolete now.

Looking back, I see what a feeling of excitement and high adventure we had then when we went off on these little isolated expeditions. We did not quite realize the real grimness of war except at certain moments. The honours between the sides were fairly even. The Germans held Greece and Crete ; we held Syria, Abyssinia and all Italian East Africa. The Axis and the British were balanced in the desert.

Then General Auchinleck arrived to take command, and 1941-1942 became the year of set battles and eventual retreat. It was no longer colonial warfare, but the war of modern European armies fighting out a decisive issue in Africa. This fighting was focused on the desert, and in that flat and limitless arena the war developed into a straight-out issue between man and man, tank and tank, army and army.

There are a thousand considerations to be taken into account, but it will have to be admitted that the Germans had the better army. They had better weapons, more soundly trained men and better generalship than we had.

Despite this stiffening and enlargement of the desert fighting, the war in the Middle East became something of a side issue through this year because Russia, Japan and America had now entered the war. Instead of being an isolated theatre, the Middle East was becoming part of world strategy.

In that black summer of 1942 it even began to look as if the Germans would reach out from Stalingrad in Russia and from Alamein, Middle

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8 PREFACE

East, and eventually join hands with the Japanese in India. But Stalingrad and Alamein held, and that was the turning-point of the war.

Then the final year, 1942-1943, the year of Eisenhower, Alexander and Montgomery, the year of success. As Montgomery struck from the desert, the Anglo-American forces landed in North Africa. The tumultuous and victorious meeting of the Eighth and the First Armies in Tunisia must go down as one of the great military strokes of history.

The Middle East was secured. The Mediterranean was reopened. And far off in the East the Japanese dynamic had at last expended itself on the borders of India. Practically the whole of the British and American Empires in the Far East had fallen, but for the moment the Japanese could do no more. And at Stalingrad the Russians had begun their great westward sweep. With Africa freed, we could at last look forward to the invasion of Europe.

As each of these three separate years of battle ended in the Middle East I wrote a book describing the operations— Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle and The End in Africa. These three are now combined in this volume.

The text is essentially the same except that here and there I have made minor corrections and deletions.

When I first began to put the three books together I planned to remove many of the personal references and shape the material into a more cohesive and historical form. But I soon found this quite impracticable. It is impossible to write a definitive history of the cam- paigns at this stage. Too many matters are still the subject of con- troversy, too much is secret, so much material remains to be gathered. The war diaries and the dispatches of the commanders have still to be published.

And so these books must remain what they are — a rambling and personal story. I think every major happening is included, and I have tried to bind the sweep of these great events into a perspective. But it is essentially an intimate picture of the Mediterranean war from one man s point of view. There are long digressions, such as the Indian chapters and the description of my journey round the world when 1 left Egypt in the summer, called at New York in the fall and London in the winter, and ended a little breathlessly in Tunisia in the spring.

These journeys were essentially part of my search to obtain a wider and fuller knowledge of the war, and the digressions will be justified if they establish only this— that the struggle which began in the desert as a simple military issue became in the end a vast imbroglio of politics and warfare in which the whole world was concerned.

. Very little here has been suppressed through censorship : I have said almost all I wanted to Tay. Inevitably there are many mistakes.

PREFACE

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Since one is writing so close to events, one cannot weed out all the errors, and for those that remain, unknown to me, I apologize. I was present at most of the events described here, and very often I discussed them on the spot or shortly afterwards with the soldiers and their com- manders and the politicians. But I must emphasize that one man can see very little of a battle, and the opinions expressed in that highly charged atmosphere are not always complete and balanced.

Throughout these three years I was writing dispatches for my news- paper the London Daily Express, and here and there at perhaps half a dozen places I felt I could not improve on those messages, and I have threaded them into the narrative.

I was also strongly tempted to add an account of the Sicilian and Italian campaigns. But these are not part of the pattern of this book ; they belong not to Africa but to Europe, and the invasion of Europe is another story.

Among all the many people who have helped this book to publica- tion I must place first my wife. She shared in many of the adventures. Quite apart from the tedious business of handling the proofs, the results of her correction and suggestion are on every page. A great part of the book is hers. Next I must thank Lieutenant-Colonel J. O. Ewart, of the Intelligence Staff, who has patiently combed through these many thousand words and given me his account of the battle of Alamein.

I cannot easily repay my debt to Lord Wavell, both for his encourage- ment to me through these years and his kindness in finding time at the busiest moment of his brilliant career to write the Foreword to this book.

At different times General Montgomery, General Auchinleck and many of their senior officers like the late General Gott discussed their battles with me and gave me access to certain documents and- war diaries, and I am particularly grateful to them. I have also profited greatly from the conferences given to correspondents by General Eisenhower, General Alexander, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, Air Marshal Coningham, Admiral Cunningham and their British and American staff officers.

The late Mr. P. P. Howe, who was editor to my publisher, Hamish Hamilton, did a great deal of work on these books. I must also rhank the hundreds of correspondents and reviewers who have used me kindly in the past ; and the companion of so many of my journeys, Alexander Clifford. Evelyn Montague of the Manchester Guardian has also checked many facts. And there is my editor, Mr. Arthur Christiansen of the Daily Express, who has kindly consented to the publication of this volume.

Beyond this there were the thousands of meetings I had in the field with the soldiers and sailors and airmen who are the actors of this story, and who unaffectedly and simply described to me what they had done.

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PREFACE

So many are dead now or wounded, my own colleagues among them. And this brings me to the only possible dedication of this book, which I set down here with much pride and, I hope, without presumption :

To the Men who Fought.

London, 1944.

ALAN MOOREHEAD

CONTENTS

PAGE

Foreword .......... 5

Preface .......... 7

BOOK I

MEDITERRANEAN FRONT

The Year of Wavell, 1940-1941 ..... 13

BOOK II

A YEAR OF BATTLE

The Year of Auchinieck, 1941-1942 . . . . 177

BOOK III

THE END IN AFRICA

The Year of Eisenhower, Alexander and Montgomery,

1942-1943 391

Index ........... 581

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MAPS

Drawn by Archie Harradine The Mediterranean Area .... Western Desert, 1940 Greece and Crete .... Western Desert, 1941-42 ....

Battle of Sidi Rezegh .... Mareth to Tunis ....

The Final Break-through .... Routes taken by the Author

Front endpaper 59

• 145

. 219

. 221

• 503

• 553 Back endpaper

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I

BOOK I

MEDITERRANEAN FRONT The Year of Wavell 1940-1941

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Operations such as these begin with a phase in which each commander struggles, on the one hand, to obtain information, and on the other to deny it to his enemy. One of the few advantages that soldiers experience in having a desert for their theatre of war is that the auditorium is empty. — extract FROM A STATEMENT ISSUED BY G.H.Q., CAIRO, JUNE I9TH, I94O.

I reached Egypt by way of Greece. Nothing could disturb that timeless apathy in the eastern Mediterranean. In Athens the diplomats talked leisurely around the point of whether Greece would fight or not. They were rather agreed on the whole that she would not. They talked too, of course, the Greeks. They said that every Italian would be thrown into the sea. But they had been talking in that strain for a long time. Anyway, Metaxas had a Fascist regime. Anyway, he was friendly with the Germans who seemed to be arriving in steadily increasing numbers at Athens and Salonica. Anyway, the Greeks were utterly divided against themselves, the army was robbed of all its Venezilist officers and intrigue was festering all the way through the Peloponnese to Thrace. I took a car to Phaleron Bay and swam far out into the gende sea while they prepared a luncheon of shrimps and strawberries in the taverna on the beach. High on a crag above the lake at Marathon I came on three aged and gaitered British bishops taking tea. They exchanged sonorous reminiscences about the Royal Family, an unusual scene, occasioned, I found later, by the fact that they had been summoned to the Balkans to investigate the possibility of the fusion of the Anglican and Orthodox Churches. Differences only of ritual apparently existed. Seeking relaxa- tion from the discussions, the bishops had motored out to Marathon and there they sat, as peaceful a group of old gentlemen as ever lingered over their tea in the vicarages of nineteenth-century England. Neither here nor anywhere in Greece was there a hint that a second Marathon was coming. This was the end of May 1940. Flying over Crete and the dreaming islands of the Aegean, it was more difficult still to understand or feel the importance of the news from France. Rethel . . . Amiens . . . Arras ... all the places to which only a few months ago when I was living in Paris I used to drive with my friends for the week-end. All these were falling.

I flew on to Cairo where we bathed in the pool of the green island, Gezira, in the Nile, or watched the cricket. The Turf Club swarmed with officers newly arrived from England, and a dozen open-air cinemas were showing every night in the hot, brightly-lit city. There were all

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the left-overs from the dollar years when all Egypt swarmed with rich American tourists. We had French wines, grapes, melons, steaks, cigarettes, beer, whisky, and abundance of all things that belonged to rich, idle peace. Officers were caking modern flats in Gezira’s big build- ings looking out over the goif course and the Nile. Polo continued with the same extraordinary frenzy in the roasting afternoon heat. No one worked from one till five-thirty or six, and even then work trickled through the comfortable offices borne along in a tide of gossip and Turkish coffee and pungent cigarettes. Only the radio and the ticker- machine kept monotonously insisting . . . Lille . . . Brussels Cherbourg. Madame Badia’s girls writhed in the belly-dance at her cabaret near the Pont des Anglais. Grey staff cars ran oack and forth ov^r Kasr el Nil bridge. The boatmen on the feluccas cursed and yelled and chanted as they have always done. The first Australian division, sent to the Palestine deserts, was cursing and complaining too. They wanted action instead of route marches in the sand. They were said to be so poorly equipped at this early stage that they were using sticks tied with red flags as anti-tank guns and sticks tied with blue rags as Brens. A sergeant, so the story ran, was court-martialled for cynically demanding a new anti-tank gun of the quartermaster, on the grounds that his old one was eaten by white ants. No, the war was not serious in Egypt at this stage. It was merely a noise on the radio. There were known to be British troops in the Western Desert, of course, but no one doing the round of the parties and the polo in Cairo and Alexandria ever seemed to see them. It was known, too, that they were impatient, and that they nursed an especial hatred of Lady Astor who had recently risen in the Commons to ask why British troops were idling in luxury along (he banks of the Mediterranean.

The war correspondents were grouped into a unit known as Public Relations, and they began to gather in Cairo with bright green-and-gold tabs on their uniforms, to seek information. Nothing will quite convey the astonishment and abhorrence with which the elderly colonel and the polo-playing messes received the newspapermen. The officers in charge of Public Relations battled loyally to break down the general and firmly entrenched belief that publicity and propaganda had nothing whatever to do with the army, were in fact anathema to the army. “ The only time I want to see anything about my men in print is when the honours lists come out, a brigade-major told me sourly. Incredible conversations occurred over the Public Relations telephones :

“ Who are you ? ”

“ Public Relations.”

“ What in the name of God is that ? ”

“ It’s the unit, sir, which ”

Never heard of you. Might be a bunch of fifth columnists or something.”

MEDITERRANEAN FRONT

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And so on. Pure Punch. And like every other unit, we squabbled and laughed and complained and muddled along. But for that cold news from France it didn’t seem to matter very much. Censors were established by the three services in offices so far apart that a correspondent had to travel a full fifteen miles in order to visit them all and obtain their stamps on his messages. We thought of organizing a censorship Derby in which each correspondent would mount a horse-drawn gharry outside Shepheard’s Hotel, and set off to get a message stamped by all three censors. Since the censors were frequently at golf or in their clubs or at parties, it was reckoned that four hours would have been fast time for the course which was to have ended at the cable office.

It was while this nonsense was amusing us that the news broke : France fallen ; Italy at war ; June 10th, 1940. Slowly, painfully, reluct- antly, the Middle East dragged itself out of its apathy. For the first time it realized fear over Dunkirk and worse fear too, closer at hand, for Italy’s armies loomed menacingly all through Africa and the Mediterranean. How long could Malta hold out ? What was to stop Balbo advancing to the Nile ? What forces had we in the Sudan and Kenya to withstand Aosta’s three hundred thousand in Eritrea and Abyssinia ? And above all, how were we to maintain communications with England ?

The answer came in the first week. The Italians attacked by land, sea and air. Communications with England were broken. Released from the menace of the French along the Mareth line in Tunis, Balbo hurried his Western Libyan army in thousands of lorries across to the Egyptian border. One after another the lights in the cities round the Mediterranean went out, and in the darkness the fleet in Alexandria was bombed from the Dodecanese Islands. But surely, we thought, Wey- gand’s army in Syria would stand true. He had done the best he could in France. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t fail to send us all those tanks in Syria, those Glen-Martin bombers, those five or ten divisions of spahis and foreign legionaries, Moroccans and Senegalese. And Legentilhomme in Djibuti was with us. That would help hold Aosta. Through the rest of June and later still we reasoned like that. The awakening was not quite complete yet. It came in the Middle East not so much when it was realized that the French Empire had capitulated as when, doggedly, the British people turned towards the Empire forces and said : “ All right. We’re strong. We’ll fight alone.”

Then, at last, it was discovered that we had virtually no forces in the Middle East. All the regiments in Cairo and the Western Desert, all the ships at Alexandria, all the garrisons in Sudan and Kenya, all the raw Australians and New Zealanders training in Palestine and Egypt, all the aircraft that swept occasionally over the burnt-out land — all these amounted to not one-tenth of the forces that Mussolini alone was gather- ing for his great drive on the Suez Canal. I11 every department of modern warfare, especially in such equipment as tanks and guns, we were

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pitifully hopelessly, weak. If you will find greatness in General Wavell, trace it back to the summer months in 1940 when he was beaten on paper before he ever fired a shot. He shut his mouth, confiding in practically no one. He put his trust in the surrounding deserts, he sent appeal after appeal to Churchill for more forces at once, and he held on. It required no great genius, that strategy of simply digging in one’s toes and waiting for the enemy to come on. What did require brilliance was the game of bluff on which the General now deliberately embarked.

It was not until some days after the opening of hostilities on the Egyptian border that I got down to the front at Solium and saw what was happening Driving out into the desert one early morning from Cairo, I made the first of many journeys to Alexandria, and then turned west along the coast through El Daba, Fuka and Maaten Bagush to Mersa Matruh This road, some three hundred miles in length, had a relatively good macadam surface, especially on the Cairo-Alexandria section, and running parallel to it beyond Alexandria was the single- track railway. Nothing in the desert justifies either road or railway. El Daba, Fuka and places farther on, like Buq Buq, are merely names on the map. No houses exist there. Bedouin, perhaps, coming on inter- mittent water-wells, may have given names to these places, but they

have nothing to attract either man or beast except this one thing a

spotless white beach that runs steeply into a sea tinted the wonderful shades of a butterfly s wing. To Mersa Matruh went Anthony and Cleopatra to enjoy that glorious bathing. On that same beach I found some hundreds of sun-blistered Scots trying to get the desert dust out of “clr ™°uths, bY wallowing naked in the water. Behind them stood Mersa Matruh, and the village at that time was intact. Driving in from the open desert, you suddenly breast a rise and your sun-strained eyes are immediately refreshed by the white township spreading out below and the cool greenish-blue of the bay beyond.

Mersa Matruh had been for years a small watering-place to which die Egyptian pashas and a few of the foreign colony in Egypt used to send their families. Hillier’s Hotel, a collection of low, white walls under a fiat roof, stood by the water’s edge ; there was the Governor’s cottage the railway station, the church and the mosque, a few shops down the central village street, and not much else. Artesian water, as at many places along this coast, was drawn from wells, and at Matruh the water was good. Yet only a few weary date-palms and a patch or two of coarse grass and saltbush pushed up through the hot, grey

Yellow rocks, saltbush, grey earth and this perfect beach was the eternal background wherever you looked in the north of the Western Desert. Except at spots along the coast and far inland it never even achieved those picturesque rolling sandhills which Europeans seem always to associate with deserts. It had fresh colours in the morning,

MEDITERRANEAN FRONT

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and immense sunsets. One clear hot cloudless day followed another in endless progression. A breeze stirred sometimes in the early morning, and again at night when one lay on a camp bed in the open, gazing up into a vaster and more brilliant sky than one could ever have conceived in Europe. I found no subde fascination there nor any mystery, unless it was tne Bedouin who appeared suddenly and unexpectedly out of the empty desert as soon as one stopped one’s car. There was a sense of rest and relaxation in the tremendous silence, especially at night, and now, after nearly two years have gone by, the silence is still the best thing I remember of the desert. So then the silence, the cool nights, the clear hot days and the eternal flatness of everything was what you learned to expect of the Western Desert.

But the morning I drove toward Mersa Matruh, looking for Force Headquarters, a khamseen was blowing, and that of course changed everything. The khamseen sandstorm, which blows more or less throughout the year, is in my experience the most hellish wind on earth. It picks up the surface dust as fine as baking powder and blows it thickly into the air across hundreds of square miles of desert. All the way through Daba’s tent-hospital base and past Fuka it gathered force along the road until at Bagush it blocked visibility down to. half a dozen yards. In front of the car little crazy fines of yellow dust snaked across the road. The dust came up through the engine, through the chinks of the car- body and round the corners of the closed windows. Soon everything in the car was powdered with grit and sand. It crept up your nose and down your throat, itching unbearably and making it difficult to breathe. It got in your ears, matted your hair, and from behind sand-goggles your eyes kept weeping and smarting. An unreal yellow fight suffused everything. Just for a moment the billows of blown sand would open, allowing you to see a little farther into the hot solid fog ahead, and then it would close in again. Bedouin, their heads muffled in dirty rags, lunged weirdly across the track. You sweated, returned again and again to your water-bottle for a swig of warm sandy water, and lay back gasping. I have known soldiers to wear their gas-masks in a khamseen, ana others to give way to fits of vomiting. Sometimes a khamseen may blow for days, making you feel that you will never see fight and air and feel coolness again. And this, my first, was a bad khamseen. I have been through many shorter and lesser ones since, and some even worse, but I hate them all and I hate the desert because of them.

Groping along from point to point, we found headquarters at last, an inexpressibly dreary place. Dugouts nosed up to the surface amid sandbags and rocks. A few low tents flapped pathetically in the wind. Camels plodded about moodily through trucks and armoured vehicles that were dispersed over a couple of miles of desert. Down on the beach in the yellow gloom a group of naked men were trying to wash the dirt away with salt-water soap. One or two grounded aircraft,

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AFRICAN TRILOGY

their engines swathed in canvas, loomed up out of the sandstorm from the airfield across the other side of the camp. Clearly the war was halted by the weather. Inside the dugouts deepening sand covered everything. In the mess-tent we poured lukewarm beer from cans into gritty glasses, and waited for a luncheon of tinned sausages that was frying in a mixture of fat and sand. There was no ice. Only war could have brought men to this place at such a time, and now we were here we could see less sense in war than ever. The storm eased slightly in the evening, but I slept that night on the ground with my sleeping-bag zipped over my head. Another hot sand-swept morning broke — one of those dreary, lifeless mornings which bring no promise or freshness or feeling of having rested.

The road leading on from Mersa Matruh to Sidi Barrani was still good at this time. Camouflaged water-wagons bound for the forward units were moving along, averaging perhaps six or seven miles an hour. At intervals of twenty miles or so little groups of these supply-wagons turned off into the open desert to the south. .Moving by compass across that waste, they would eventually meet brigade, battalion and company headquarters that would be resting briefly at some point that was nothing more than a number on the map. Units were seldom directed to places in the desert. They were simply ordered to proceed on a compass bearing to a certain point, and there camp down. Except in action, there was wireless silence, and communications were kept up by a few light aircraft and motor-cyclists.

More and more I began to see that desert warfare resembled war at sea. Men moved by compass. No position was static. There were few if any forts to be held. Each truck or tank was as individual as a destroyer, and each squadron of tanks or guns made great sweeps across the desert as a battle-squadron at sea will vanish over the horizon. One did not occupy the desert any more than one occupied the sea. One simply took up a position for a day or a week, and patrolled about it with Bren-gun carriers and light armoured vehicles. When you made contact with the enemy you manoeuvred about him for a place to strike much as two fleets will steam into position for action. There were no trenches. There was no front line. We might patrol five hundred miles into Libya and call the country ours. The Italians might as easily have patrolled as far into the Egyptian desert without being seen. Actually these patrols in terms of territory conquered meant nothing. They were simply designed to obtain information from personal observation and the capture of prisoners. And they had a certain value in keeping the enemy nervous. But always the essential governing principle was that desert forces must be mobile : they were seeking not the conquest of territory or positions but combat with the enemy. W e hunted men, not land, as a warship will hunt another warship, and care nothing for the sea on which the action is fought. And as a ship submits to the sea

MEDITERRANEAN FRONT

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by the nature of its design and the way it sails, so these new mechanized soldiers were submitting to the desert. They found weaknesses in the ruthless hostility of the desert and ways to circumvent its worst moods. They used the desert. They never sought to control it. Always the desert set the pace, made the direction and planned the design. The desert offered colours in browns, yellows and greys. The army accord- ingly took these colours for its camouflage. There were practically no roads. The army shod its vehicles with huge balloon tyres and did without roads. Nothing except an occasional bird moved quickly in the desert. The army for ordinary purposes accepted a pace of five or six miles an hour. The desert gave water reluctantly, and often then it was brackish. The army cut its men — generals and privates — down to a gallon of water a day when they were in forward positions. There was no food in the desert. The soldier learned to exist almost entirely on tinned foods, and contrary to popular belief remained healthy on it. Mirages came that confused the gunner, and the gunner developed precision-firing to a finer art and learned new methods of establishing observation-posts close to targets. The sandstorm blew, and the tanks, profiting by it, went into action under the cover of the storm. We made no new roads. We built no houses. We did not try to make the desert liveable, nor did we seek to subdue it. We found the life of the desert primitive and nomadic, and primitively and nomadically the army lived and went to war.

I make these points at length here because in my belief the Italians failed to accept these principles, and when the big fighting began in the winter it was their undoing. They wanted to be masters of the desert. They made their lives comfortable and static. They built roads and stone houses and the officers strode around in brilliant scented uniforms. They tried to subdue the desert. And in the end the desert beat them.

Already on this midsummer morning when I drove down the road to Sidi Barrani, Marshal Balbo was piling up his great luxurious army along the Egyptian frontier and preparing to roll on across the Western Desert to the Nile. Only a tiny, experienced and toughened little British force stood against him. We came into Sidi Barrani, glaring white in the sun, and the storm was lifting at last. The civilians had long since been evacuated — only a few hundred of them — and the empty houses had been looted by the Bedouin. The first exploratory Italian air raiders had been over the village that morning, and half a dozen dwellings and a general store had been split open. The road was dotted with small, three-foot bomb-craters. There was no sign of the army although half a squadron of British fighter aircraft rested on a remote rise, immobile.

Now we had something almost as bad as the sandstorm to face. The made road ceased in Sidi Barrani. We plunged into knee-deep fine sand that blew up through the floorboards of the car in billowing stifling

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waves Every vehicle on the track set up an immense column of dust behind it, creating almost the impression of a destroyer at sea laying a smoke-screen Drivers of passing vehicles manoeuvred to get to the windward of one another so that they would not be overwhelmed in one another s dust. With each man seeking his own track, a full half- mile width of desert was broken up into drifting sand, and sometimes a car plunging through this uneasy surface would crash upon a hidden rock with a force that knocked the breath out of the passengers. Petrol tins burst. Rations flung madly about in the interior of the trucks. I sat there holding the side of the car, hating the desert.

At a salt-pan beside the sea, which for some reason bears the name

uq Buq, we came on one of the advance headquarters. It was clearer and cooler here, at last, and the soothing whisper of the waves came across the sand-dunes. Guns, tanks and cars were dispersed about rather like an American middle-western caravan at a halt. In the centre of the dried-up lake stood the officers’ mess-a plain trestle-table with a camp stove burning beside it. We took tea there, and as we drank, a whistle suddenly shrilled from the edge of the camp and we ran for the slit trenches. These trenches were to become as famous as the Anderson shelters in London. They were simply narrow graves dug about four feet into the earth. Whenever it stopped for the night, the first job of the crew of every fighting vehicle was to dig one of these trenches. Apart from retaliation, it was the only protection the desert could give against air raids, and it was nearly a hundred per cent, effective. I myself have been in a trench when a bomb has burst three yards away and come to no harm beyond being partly buried in sand. And so on this day we huddled into the trench and crouched there while a three-engined Savoia bomber, flying low enough for us to see its pilot, swept leisurely over the horizon. We had at that time no effective gun for hitting him. It was just a matter of crouching there and seeing if our camouflage was good or not. He came down to two thousand feet and circled slowly round. The afternoon was now sparkling clear, and it seemed so certain that he must see and dive that it was a curious unlooked-for disappoint- ment when he turned away and nothing happened. We went back to tea.

Now at last we were close to the front and able to see Wavefl’s game of bluff in action. It was vitally necessary, the general saw, to convince the enemy that we were much stronger than we actually were This was not easy in so open a place as the desert. Yet it was being done —how successfully we only learned months later. The painfully thin British forces were scattered for hundreds of miles across the desert facing the Libyan frontier. They had one all-important standing order : make one man appear to be a dozen, make one tank look like a squadron make a raid look like an advance. And so this little Robin Hood force’ being unable to withstand any sort of a determined advance by the half-

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dozen Italian divisions across the border, did the unpredicted, unexpected thing — it attacked. It attacked not as a combined force but in small units, swiftly, irregularly and by night. It pounced on Italian outposts, blew up the captured ammunition, and ran away. It stayed an hour, a day, or a week in a position, and then disappeared. The enemy had no clear idea of when he was going to be attacked next or where. Fort Maddalena fell, and Capuzzo. Sidi Aziz was invested. British vehicles were suddenly astride the road leading back from Bardia, shooting up convoys. Confused and anxious, the Italians rigged up searchlights and scoured the desert with them while British patrols lay grinning in the shadows. Soon, from prisoners we learned extraordinary stories were going the rounds behind the Italian lines. There were two . . . three . . . five British armoured divisions operating, they said. A large-scale British attack was imminent. Balbo drew in his horns, cut down his own patrols and called for more reinforcements from Rome. The bluff was working.

Back in Cairo, Wavell, consulting with Air Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore and Admiral Cunningham, knew that it had to work. He had to have time. Every day brought the first convoys of reinforcements nearer Egypt, and without them he knew he would not withstand a large-scale Italian attack. Somehow that attack had to be delayed through the summer. Somehow the enemy had to be kept timid, anxious and in doubt. But there were signs that Balbo would not be deluded for ever. Already after the first few weeks he was cautiously trying out his hand, cautiously testing the strength of the British.

It was at one such moment that I had arrived from Buq Buq at Solium, geographically the most distinctive spot in the Western Desert. The coast here sweeps round in a great curve to the Libyan frontier. Locked in the arc of this shallow bay lies the lower half of the village of Solium, a customs post, sheltering among a group of some thirty white- topped stone huts beside the sea. A small jetty has been constructed to accommodate coastal steamers bringing supplies to the unfortunate people who lived monotonously in this monotonous spot. But easily the most arresting thing, the thing that riveted your eyes from miles away, was the escarpment. This is an immense cliff rising six hundred feet sheer from the Egyptian plain. The cliff, buttressing on its heights the Libyan desert and reaching at its depths the Western Desert, cuts on to the Mediterranean roughly at right angles on a north-south line. South of Solium, however, it strikes south-east and runs away from the strict north-south line of the Egyptian Libyan border. Two routes wind up the cliff-face from lower Solium : one which climbs precariously over the very edge of the sea is a wide modern road. The other, Halfaya Pass — Hellfire Pass was the troops’ word for it — is no more than a track. It starts from the coast a few miles east of Solium, and over broken grey

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rocks and rubble lifts you steeply on to the Libyan desert. Once on the top there you command a broad vision of the Egyptian coastline sweep- mg far away to the east Upper Solium was then a collection of sun- baked white barracks, the home of an Egyptian frontier force, and a tony an-fieid. Fifteen or twenty miles away on the coast to the north-

Ssrk Bfdla’ the flrv Ll,byan ^wnship, and at this time an important Fascist headquarters Dividing Solium and Bardia, and along the whole frontier, Mussolini had constructed a wire fence. This ran southward some hundreds of miles, and was built, it was said, to prevent the Libyan natives escaping into Egypt from the Fascist regime It consisted of a quadruple line of five-feet metal stakes bedded in concrete and closely woven with barbed wire. It must have been some twenty feet in width. The cost of the fence must have been enormous, its conception absurd, ts uses ml. It revealed how strongly a man may be driven by the acquisitive instinct, how ridiculous a lust for property can be. The escaping Libyan threw out his cloak over the barbed wire, and crawled through The British tank setting out on patrol into Libya simply nosed the fence aside Yet that absurd fence, like many another absurd Italian device in the desert, seemed to give the Fascist soldier a sense of

th' P"S,S“n“ »f » edging

rhA WtbllCk ni!htnwhen * joined one of our forward companies on the heights above Solium. Since they were within range, the soldiers lived in caves among the rocks and slept by day. At night they crawled out and, mounting trucks and Bren-gun carriers, bowled confidently across the face of the desert up to the Italian lines. Reaching the point . where their car engines might be heard, they disembarked and crept forward afoot until they came on an Italian outpost. Then with the bayonet they set about taking prisoners of those who submitted quickly and killing those who did not. It was heady, exciting work. From far across the desert as I stood talking to an outgoing patrol the Italian searchlight would turn full upon us. I was tempted to duck and hide though we were much too distant to be seen.

fakJn°rICaPLUZZ°’ S°me flje,mllcS r' 3W,n t0 the south-west, had just been taken though not occupied by us for the very good reason that we had

not the troops or the vehicles to spare to man it. But wrecking-parties were gomg into the fort each night to deal with ammunition stores and vehicles the Italians left behind. Capuzzo was little else but four white stone walls with crenellated battlements enclosing a central courtyard Around the edges of the courtyard were the men’s quarters. It was a typical desert post of the type that was valuable for keeping Arab tribes-

hghtesr shell' m°dem Walk crumPled under even the

It was arranged that we should return the following night and go in wnh a patrol to see this Fort Capuzzo. To cross there in the daylight

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meant bringing down certain fire from the Italians. Of course, the company commander agreed unemotionally, it was always possible that an enemy patrol might be entering the fortress in the darkness about the same time as we would be. Additionally, the approaches to the fort were mined. These land mines, like the fence, were another illustration of the Italian passion for defence. The whole distance from Solium to Benghazi he strewed them across the desert. Later we were to get sufficiently used to them to be able to treat them with contempt. Yet they were good mines. They were about four feet long and divided into three compartments. The two end compartments each contained four pounds of explosives, the central one the detonator. A green lid snapped down over the top of the whole mine. Originally the mines were designed to explode at the pressure of an ordinary wheeled vehicle, but the detonator wires rusted and they were often sensitive even to the footfall of a man. These mines were laid in lines across the roads and around all fortified positions. Usually they were buried just deep enough to allow a thin layer of sand to rest on top of them, but the depressions could be clearly seen as a rule. A mine going off on the driver’s side of a vehicle would have sufficient force to break the legs of the driver or even destroy him and the vehicle altogether. Tank tracks could be broken by a mine. So special sapper squads were formed to deal with them, and always when an advance was on you would see the sappers going on ahead. The chief danger was that one would stumble on these mines in the darkness, and that, I remember, was the uppermost thought in my mind as we drove up to Solium the following night to make our expedition into Capuzzo.

As we crept round the bay in the darkness the whole black silhouetted edge of the escarpment above suddenly erupted with high explosive. It came so unexpectedly that it was impossible to say what it was — mines, shells or bombs. But then a second and a third line of explosions lit the cliff-top and thundered in billowing, acrid smoke across Solium toward the sea. We stopped the car and watched. It began to look like shelling . . . yes, certainly Italian shelling. As we watched, a truck came flying down the cliff road and raced past us, then another and another. A staff car loomed up from the same direction and, bumping to a standstill, deposited the brigade-major on to the sand beside us.

“ Where the hell do you think you’re going ? ”

“ Capuzzo, sir. We arranged ”

The major was tired and harassed. “ All right,” he snapped. “Just let me know how you get on. I’m getting out myself. Fifty enemy tanks have just gone into the fort, and I’d like to know what else is coming. They’re laying down a barrage now along the escarpment.” He need not have told us. Another burst of shells whined overhead and broke the darkness with yellow flashes. So Capuzzo was retaken, then. Balbo was showing his hand. I had wanted badly to see Capuzzo, for

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it was important war news in those days, but there was nothing for it but to turn back toward our rear positions.

We cut south from the road at Buq Buq and, travelling over a broken track all the next day, we climbed the escarpment deep in the desert. On the Libyan plateau there we found units of our armoured forces. It was the first time I had seen these men who were eight months later to make their great march to the Libyan Gulf and overwhelm the last of the broken Italian armies at the battle of Beda Fomm. Already they had been months in the desert. Their faces had blistered red in the sun and after so long an isolation from civilization they were eager to meet any stranger. We were taken to the brigadier and with delight we heard from him that he intended to try to recapture Capuzzo with his tanks that same night. We went forward to a slight rise some four miles out of Capuzzo, and waited there in the blazing afternoon sun for the attack to begin. Before us the tower and the white walls of the fort rose above the lip of the horizon. On the left flank a half-squadron of our medium tanks had broken through the frontier fence and lay silently waiting for the arrival of a heavily armed enemy squadron which, our intelligence had learned, was making its way from Sidi Aziz toward Capuzzo. On the right flank the main body of British tanks which were to carry the main assault at dusk was creeping in open formation toward the fort. At our feet stood a battery of twenty-five-pounder guns. We had been told that was the battle plan. Now in the hot tense silence of the late afternoon we waited for the drama to unroll. As the sun, growing redder and larger, dipped on Libya, it began to unfold stage by stage. First came the British aircraft to sweep the sky of enemy raiders. They plunged on an Italian flight of three Savoias that was bombing rear head- quarters behind us, , and put them to flight. Then, a line of black geese in the red sky, the British fighters wheeled over the expectant battlefield, found the sky clear and turned away. The battery before us opened up, not shrilly or loudly for the heavy air seemed to deaden the sound. There was just the steady rhythmical coughing of each gun firing in turn. They were sighting on an Italian battery to the left of the fort, and as each hit registered a great pillar of black sand and smoke flowered upward and spread in the form of a mushroom, making a great stain on the clear blue background of the sea beyond. The Italians did not reply. The British tanks, no more than silhouettes now in the waning light, waited motionless. A desert fox ran across the battlefield. Someone laughed. I went over to our car and got out a pot of raspberry jam and some biscuits and handed them around. The attack would come any moment now. I dredged up another spoonful of jam and felt absurdly that I was again sitting in the Haymarket Theatre in London at a Saturday matinee, and I wanted to laugh. My shirt had gone dirty black with soaking perspiration. Then the tanks attacked. They had half a mile to go, and each tank, shooting as it went, attacked one of the Italian guns

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spaced around Capuzzo’s walls. The enemy guns waited perhaps two minutes. Then they spouted out a deafening salvo that enveloped the whole fort in smoke. Smoke rose everywhere. A full expanding cloud of blown dust split by gun-flashes rolled out across the desert toward us, and one after another the British tanks dived into it and disappeared. In a moment the battle lost all shape. There was only noise and light grow- ing louder and brighter under the pall of smoke. We waited, straining our eyes until it was full night, and then, while the firing began gradually to die away, we turned back to brigade headquarters to find out what had happened.

Nothing good had happened. The Italians had driven our tanks off. The British colonel in command was wounded. One or two of our tanks were wrecked, others for the moment missing. As we ate bully stew in the mess, ambulances lumbered back over the rocky track.

This, the first action I had seen in the desert, was a defeat. With one minor exception late in the Benghazi campaign, it was the only British reverse at the hands of the Italians that I was going to see for more than a year.

2

Graziani has taken command ... an attack must he expected. — state- ment ISSUED BY G.H.Q., CAIRO, AUGUST 6TH, I94O.

In the full midsummer of 1940, Mussolini saw his great chance. Italy had earned only contempt for her entrance into the battle of France when the battle of France was done. Now, with England preoccupied with home defence, her Mediterranean and African possessions seemed an easy prey. Conquest in Africa would elevate and enrich Mussolini at home, increase his standing with Hitler, and justify Italy to herself and the world. With the French armies in Tunis and Syria removed, there was no saying how many British mandates and possessions and spheres of influence might not fall. There were Malta, the Sudan, Palestine, Cyprus, British Somaliland, Aden, Iraq, Kenya and, richest of all, the Nile valley. Nowhere was there anything like a strong British garrison. Even at sea the Mediterranean fleet was outgunned and outnumbered. In the air the odds were ridiculously to the Fascists’ advantage. There were not at this stage more than half a dozen Hurricanes in Africa. So orders went out from Rome to the Italian commanders in Libya and Abyssinia to attack. In Tobruk easy-going Balbo had met his death in an air crash that may or may not have been accidental ; “ Butcher ” Graziani took command.

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In Addis Ababa the Duke of Aosta had a score of good generals and ample stores for a colonial campaign.

Soon the Italians had retaken all the frontier points in Libya, like Capuzzo and Fort Maddalena. Kassala, the border town between the Sudan and Eritrea, was captured easily by Italian forces advancing north- ward. Gallabat, on the Abyssinian border farther south, was the next, together with Kurmuk. Around to the westward the British were driven out of Gambela, a trading post, and southward on the Kenya boundary, Fort Harrington was swiftly overwhelmed. Fascist columns began marching deep into Kenya. There was worse to come. Pro- British General Legentilhomme, the French commander in Djibuti, was ousted from his command by Vichy and forced to flee into British territory, leaving behind a group of French leaders who were willing, even eager, to parley with Aosta. That meant a Red Sea port for the Italians as well as Massawa, and, better still, a guarded flank for their next move. In August Aosta threw two partly mechanized divisions into British Somaliland. They were split into three columns, one striking directly at Zeila on the coast ; the other two farther east advancing through the mountains on Berbera, the capital. Two British battalions largely of native troops fought a rearguard action. But it was soon over. A British colony— a poor one, but still a British possession— was at last in Axis hands. It was the Empire’s first territorial loss with the exception of the Channel Islands. The propaganda effect was considerable. In England, now enduring the full weight of the first heavy daylight attacks, people began to despair of the Middle East. In Italy Mussolini rode on a sudden wave of enthusiasm and popularity. Italians everywhere after generations of inferiority complex began to tell themselves : “ We are a revived nation. We can fight.” They had felt that a little over the Ethiopian, Spanish and Albanian campaigns. But now they were opposed to British, and to beat the British was a high excitement. Mussolini, no fool, would not deny this rising wave of high morale. Even his lukewarm supporters were eager for more victories. Even Germany was smiling politely and with just a shade more respect. In Rome, then, in that romantic grandiloquent room in the Palazzo Venezia that had seen so many Fascist chances taken and won, the Duce hatched his grand plan for the conquest of the Middle East and the enlargement of his African Empire to more than three times its size.

With France out of the way, the Italian grand strategy had clearly four main themes : a full-scale holding raid southward of Kenya ; another northward through Kassala down the Atbara River to the Nile to isolate Khartoum and cut the British retreat from Egypt ; an invasion of Egypt direct with motorized columns advancing along the coast to Alexandria and Cairo ; and attack in the later stages on Greece through Albania in order to draw off British forces to Athens and thus weaken the resistance against Graziani in the Western Desert. The importance

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of the two southerly raids was also to keep the British dispersed and weak in Egypt, which was to be subjected to the full shock of the Libyan army. In conception the plan was excellent ; in execution deplorable. Mussolini did not even have especially bad luck. He simply once again overstrained and overestimated the Italian people. His thoughts reached upward heroically. The people remained tied to the ground, artistic, erratic, shiftless, individualist and irresponsible.

But all went well at first. The most southerly column plunged farther and farther into Kenya, where General Cunningham’s South, West and East African forces were still unprepared for battle. In Eritrea forces were gathering rapidly to sweep on to the Sudan. In Libya, Graziani gave the order to advance. Down the escarpment came the Fascist armies, a host several divisions strong, as brave and confident as a crusade on the march. Wavell’s bluff had been called. The Italians had come out at last to do battle, and there was nothing for it but to beat a retreat with the tiny British forces in as dignified a way as possible.

Only two very minor but significant incidents relieved the depressing effect of this new withdrawal. At Solium British gunners noted that enemy vehicles coming down the winding escarpment road into Egypt caught the sun on their windshields at one exposed corner. A few seconds later each vehicle exposed itself again very briefly on another bend lower down. Our gunners had merely to note each reflected flash from the windshields and then aim at the lower corner. In this way numbers of enemy transports were knocked out and the Italian advance was delayed.

At Solium also, British Engineers had mined a number of buildings and dumps before they retired to a point farther up the coast, taking their detonating wires with them. They were about to start exploding Solium at this safe distance when an Italian artillery observation plane appeared over the village, and the enemy gunners directed by the pilot began to lay down a barrage. The situation was piquant. Both sides were allied in destroying the same object. With a nice sense of humour the British commander ordered his men to wait until they heard an Italian gun fire, then, before the shell landed he gave instructions for one of his mines to be exploded. Inevitably the mine went off in a part of the village where the Italian air-observer had not directed his fire. One knew that the enemy observer, utterly mystified, was signalling back to his guns demanding they should correct their fire and asking the reason for the double explosion. Undoubtedly, too, he was getting equally confused replies from his gunners. The farce went on until the British mines were exhausted. The Italian plane flew off and Solium was released at last from the fury of the two armies. I say these two episodes were significant, for they revealed that the British under fire from a heavy enemy advance showed no panic and, indeed, even at this early stage held the Italian in some contempt. Then, too, our casualties

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in the withdrawal were scarcely a score of men and vehicles, and not the two thousand which Graziani with grandiose stupidity claimed in his first communique.

But no one in Cairo that September knew how far and how fast Graziani was going to go. Wavell had determined to avoid serious engagement until the Italians reached Mersa Matruh, about one-third of the way to the Delta. We had been digging traps and entrenchments in the sand for months at Mersa Matruh, but would they hold ? Down the escarpment came more and more water-trucks, guns, donkey teams, tanks, armoured cars. There were thousands of vehicles against our hundreds, divisions of men against our brigades, squadrons of Savoias and Capronis against our handful of Blenheims and Gladiators. Graziani, who could hardly be called a hot-head, pulled up short at Sidi Barrani after the first sixty miles to consolidate and wait for the Greek stage of the Italian plan to mature. Slowly, methodically and with immense labour he began to fortify and build up his lines of communications. By the late autumn he had at Sidi Barrani a sure base from which to embark on the second leg of his advance to the Suez Canal, and some hundred thousand men all well equipped were ready to set out in the cool of the winter. His new road, the Via della Vittoria, linking Solium with Sidi Barrani, needed only light screenings and tarring for completion. He had abundant supplies of all kinds. He had control in the air— in numbers anyway. The British victory at Taranto, though serious, had not knocked out the Italian Navy. The battle of Cape Matapan was still to come.

Mussolini’s Greek invasion came in November with nice riming No one could have foreseen the disaster ahead. It was in Greece that both Mussolini and General Wavell had their major setbacks. Both started in Africa, both failed to wait until they had consolidated their African victories, both went to Greece hastily, too lightly armed and taking too little account of the differences between colonial war in Africa and world war in Europe. The only major difference between the adventures of the two men was that Mussolini himself elected to go to Greece. Wavell was forced to it.

No one could have guessed how deeply Mussolini had been misled by his intelligence services on two vital points. It seems he really believed the Greeks would not fight. That was his first error. He failed to learn the lessons of the Republicans in Spain, the Finns in Finland. Nor was Mussolini alone in failing to see that war was still made with men first and machines second, and that a people once fired with a passionate hatred and an emotional patriotism are the most dangerous enemy in the world though they lack every essential piece of equipment. His second mistake was in believing Wavell was stronger than he actually was. He did not know that Wavell, apart from a few aircraft, simply did not have more than a brigade or two at the most to spare for Greece at that time. He

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did not know that the Greeks had said to Wavell : “ Give us a strong force of five or six equipped divisions or no men at all, otherwise, if you send a small force, it will merely provoke the Germans against us without our being able to withstand them.” So what British troops there were in Egypt stayed there to meet Graziani. Part of Mussolini’s plan had miscarried. No British expeditionary force was sent to Greece at that moment for the embarrassing reason that there was none large enough to send. We were a small but united command.

It is conceivable that Mussolini might have done better if he had reversed the later stages of his plan : i.e., to have attacked Greece first and then sent Graziani into Egypt. Then possibly Wavell might have been induced to send troops to Greece and left himself exposed in Egypt. That, anyway, was what happened later.

I personally had seen none of the reverses which led up to the triumphant Italian position at the beginning of the winter of 1940. I had left the Western Desert before Graziani advanced to Sidi Barrani and had gone down to the Sudan with the first party of war correspondents. In mid-July we had boarded the bi-weekly train in Cairo and in stifling heat travelled overnight to Shellal where two river-boats festered in the mud much in the same way as they did when Kitchener passed by on his way to conquer the Sudan from the Khalifa forty years before. One of the boats, I believe, was actually built by Kitchener. They were squalid double-decked affairs designed like houseboats, square shaped, with rows of cabins lining each deck. Rows of flat barges piled with grain or cotton or peanuts and swarming with natives were lashed to either side of the parent, boat, and bathed it with the perpetual odour of cooking fat and human offal. A giant water-wheel thrashed out the stale Nile water from the square stern; and there was an open space forward set out like a lounge where we sat and sweated and stuck to the wicker chairs and imagined we were gathering a breeze from the snail-like motion of the boat. For two days and nights we sat there climbing the river between Shellal and Wadi Haifa where the first cataract starts on the Sudan border. A month later I did the same journey in twenty minutes in the cockpit of a Blenheim bomber.

Nothing is quite so slow as the deadly excruciating slowness of the Nile boats. It was before the annual flood, and I gazed across the mud flats at the strip of green on either bank — palms, wheat, reeds, grass huts — that always seemed the same and never revealed any motion in the boat. Farther up, nearer the White Nile sources, a planter told me, one sees the same tree sticking out of the river for three days. One day is spent steaming up to the tree, another in winding around it, a third in watching it disappear on a horizon of dun-coloured lifeless reeds and sleepy water. To do this in cool winter, to do it in peace-time on holiday in the company of women when the moon at nignt is brighter than an English winter sun— all this would be fine. To do it in midsummer, in

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war, when there are no women and the drinks are warm and the flies innumerable, and one is in a hurry and suffering from the mild dysentery everyone gets in Africa, is my idea of slow torture. Yet this journey I see now was an oasis in the rush with which we lived, and we really did enjoy parts of it. Edward Genock of Paramount News stowed his film in the overworked icebox to stop it melting. Ronald Matthews of the Daily Herald summoned what bottles of cool Allsop’s beer he could. Richard Dimbleby of the B.B.C. found a chaise-longue and a grass fan. I stripped to the waist and read through The River War , that classic book on the Omdurman campaign, written by Kitchener’s young second- lieutenant in the Twenty-first Lancers, Winston Churchill. Churchill, already beginning his career as a war correspondent, records with powerful accuracy just what the Upper Nile was like when he went up it at the end of last century to take part in the Lancers’ great charge at Omdurman. The description holds still, will always hold. With feeling I read : “ This great tract which may conveniently be called The Military Sudan stretches with apparent indefiniteness over the face of the continent. Level plains of smooth sand— a little rosier than buff, a little paler than salmon — are interrupted only by occasional peaks of rock— black, stark and shapeless. Rainless storms dance tirelessly over the hot crisp surface of the ground. The fine sand, driven by the wind, gathers into deep drifts and silts among the dark rocks of the hills, exactly as snow hangs about an Alpine summit ; only it is fiery snow such as might fall in hell. The earth burns with the quenchless thirst of ages and in the steel-blue sky scarcely a cloud obstructs the unrelenting triumph of the sun.” Then again : “ It is scarcely within the power of words to describe the savage desolation of the regions into which the line and its constructors now plunged. A smooth ocean of bright coloured sand spread far and wide to distant horizons. The tropical sun beat with senseless perseverance upon the level surface until it could scarcely he touched with a naked hand, the filmy air glittered and shimmered as over a furnace. Here and there huge masses of crumbling rock rose from the plain, like islands of cinders in a sea of fire.”

Despite the heat, one had to agree with Churchill that the trans- formation of the colours of the river and the desert at sunset had a beauty that was quite unearthly. Churchill, then still in his twenties, abandoned for a moment his Gibbonesque phrasing to describe it like this : “ There is one hour when all is changed. Just before the sun sets towards the western cliffs a delicious flush brightens and enlivens the landscape. It is as though some titanic artist in an hour of inspiration were retouching the picture, painting in dark purple shadows among the rocks, strengthen- ing the lights on the sands, gilding and beautifying everything, and making the whole scene live. The river, whose windings made it look like a lake, turns from muddy brown to silver grey. The sky from a dull blue deepens into violet in the west. Everything under that magic touch becomes vivid and alive. And then the sun sinks altogether behind the

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rocks, the colours fade out of the sky, the flush off the sands, and gradu- ally everything darkens and grows grey — like a man s cheek when he is bleeding to death. We are left sad and sorrowful in the dark, until the stars light up and remind us that there is always something beyond.”

Much of Churchill’s time was spent around Wadi Haifa and that is where now one goes ashore, passes through the Sudan customs and takes the train — Kitchener’s train — on through Atbara to Khartoum. There, Dimbleby was taken at once to hospital with diphtheria. The rest of us, Matthews, Genock and myself, were summoned to Lieut.-General Platt, the man who under the native title of the Kaid was responsible for guarding this territory almost the size of Europe from the Italians.

He told us blundy at once his position was precarious. Some two thousand men — a little more than one man to a mile of frontier — was the entire army with which the Imperial Government had provided him. He had the use of four obsolete Vincent aircraft, and down near the Red Sea a couple of squadrons of obsolescent W ellesleys had been loaned by the R.A.F. to keep the British sea-lane free of Italian raiders. That was all. The Sudan Defence Force, though well trained, had no tanks, no artillery, and its thin native ranks were a joke compared with the legions Aosta was preparing to bring against us. Even in the last few weeks an ominous warning had come in the fall of Kassala, and with Kassala one branch of our railway to Port Sudan had been cut. The affair was all the more serious as we ourselves, using the offensive patrol tactics of the Western Desert, had been planning to attack the Italian positions behind Kassala at the time. A cypher clerk had failed to send on the final action orders to the British forces at the vital moment. In the confusion that followed, when the British were regrouping, the Italians themselves had taken the initiative, swooping on Kassala on the very day when the Gash Paver, since time immemorial, came down in flood. Since the river runs between the town and the railway station, and there was no bridge, this meant that the little British garrison in the town was all but cut off. General Wavell had been up to Khartoum, the Kaid said, and there was some prospect of reinforcements and better staff work. But at the moment tilings were in a very anxious state indeed.

Nor were we more than a few days in Khartoum when we found how sorely unprepared for war both psychologically and materially was the place. Most of the white men had been in the- colony for years, building by sheer hard work in a difficult climate an administration and an economy that was a model of Government anywhere. Unlike the administrations of Egypt, the Sudan officials had made their homes there and established families and identified themselves with the country. They had won the confidence of the natives. They had, moreover, a great deal of sympathy for the Italian settlers and administrators across the border who in the few years they had been in Abyssinia were making 2

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t0 pr°dur an°theTr ™dd coIony as well. Friendships had naturally grown up between Italians and British. Military outposts exchanged gifts of whisky and chianti across the border. Italian officers visited British messes and the British went back across the border where

rcnpr0SlPISykWaS retUrned- Slr. George Symes, the British Governor- General, had become intimate with the Duke of Aosta who had stayed at the palace in Khartoum making friends everywhere with his charm his command of English, his Englishness.” Everyone liked Aosta and friendships spread among the white staffs of the two races. The Italians

anTtb^ ^ ^ that War with Britain was unthinkable,

yd,thf BntlSTh had agreed enthusiastically. But now suddenly, on that

ttdr m JUnC’ MufollTm,declared war, and the former friends found themselves enemies. An Italian colonel had to cancel a social visit to a British unit on the Abyssinian border.

Now all that these administrators had painfully built up through the rSkTut0ibe u°m d?Wv an^ thr°wn away in warfare. The bridges £ *JM|,ke “ f«ced through mourn™, and acrS deserts, the railways and fine new houses and waterworks they had forged in this barren waste, were suddenly to be destroyed. The friends with whom they had played polo and drunk were to be cut down. It was, in all truth unthinkable. Here, remote from the play of politics in Europe, it was hard to reverse one s ideas overnight. Here, where every white man, Italian or British, was an ally in the labour of gathering the

?o WaSua flat “ of a11 sense to & ^ tribes

slovdv Suian and Ita lan East AfrlCa went to war reluctantly and lowly and with immense misgiving. It was a gentleman’s war. There

was some undefined but quite real understanding that there would be no bombing of civilians or helpless native settlements. When Balbo one of the same gendemaifiy cult as Aosta, died, his death was announced in the Sudan Herald with black borders around the printed column. I found

Briri?beXpreSSed’ und“current feell?g that the two colonies, Italian and British, were not really concerned in the war, and since their battles could not affect the general situation there was no point in carrying the fighting to extremes Germany was the real enemy. I wasto see rough the months ahead how this lax but very understandable feeling was to harden into animosity and how in deadly engagements like Keren real hatred was to emerge. But to the end our campaign in East Africa was conducted on lines that never approached the fury and bitter- ness of Europe or left scars comparable with even a single week’s fighting in the battle of France or Russia. g g

rh, mrCrVn the.kie JXiy °f I94°’ ^hen the rains were beginning to cool the torrid air a little, there was apathy in Khartoum. The lions and more

dangerous beasts had been killed in Khartoum’s famous zoo, lest, being wounded in an air raid, the animals might run amok through the streets8 The white civilians, many of them middle-aged men, hadcoiSived To

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collect a few Lewis guns and, banding themselves into a home guard, they trained with astonishing vigour on the flat stony ground across the Nile at Omdurman. But it was an exuberant half-measure, and there was nothing in Khartoum to withstand any sort of an attack either by land or air. Haile Selassie had arrived from England by air a day before us and was installed in a shoddy pink villa surrounded by a garden of lifeless shrubs along the Blue Nile. Thither we were conducted one morning, and in the first bright heat of the day the Emperor emerged on to his balcony and gravely shook us by the hand. He himself had still that impassive dignity that carried him through defeat and humiliation in Geneva. His eyes were quick and watchful, and his bearing still imperious. But his surroundings were shabby, his hopes remote and his whole cause a tiny dagger in a world of heavy bombers and batdeships. The ceremony that morning verged on the ridiculous. It was only Selassie’s extraordinary restless spirit and his overwhelming seriousness that made the occasion seem at all real. Ethiopian chieftains who had lately crossed the Italian lines to Sudan were brought before him. They were barefoot, clad in unclean shapeless robes, their fuzzy hair, stiff with grease and lice, was piled on their neads, their bodies were wound about with huge cartridge belts filled with bullets from the wars of another century . . . bullets for which they had no guns, anyway. They prostrated themselves before Selassie, who sat in the bright sun under an enormous topee, evincing no interest whatever. Genock, surrounded by native boys, toiled round the Emperor, filming hard. He crouched, sighted, squatted, took angle-shots and close-ups, while the rest of us stood about saying nothing ; and faindy in one’s head one heard the Italian jeers. Truly that morning the chances of the King of Kings did not look auspicious. Nor could one find much hope in the contemplation of the youthful Duke of Harrar, the Emperor’s son, who had changed from the pyjamas in which we had first met him into a suit of khaki drill that hung shapelessly on his slight angular body. Presendy we went inside the house with the Emperor, and drank warm beer laced with lemonade. Selassie unbent toward Genock, an old friend, but they talked mosdy about a camera the Emperor wanted to sell, and his monosyllabic replies coming through to us by way of an Amharic interpreter advanced neither our information about the present nor our hopes for the future. Through his chief aide, a cultured and attractive little Ethiopian, Selassie issued a proclamation that day saying he had returned to free his country from the Italians. Plans were on foot for getting this proclamation into the dissident tribes in Abyssinia, plus a few guns and golden thalers. But

fjrivately the Emperor had been surprised and deeply disappointed at the ack of arms in the Sudan and the failure of the British to offer him any- thing concrete. In London he had understood that he would be furnished with bombers, guns, trucks, tanks, ammunition, and he did not hesitate to express his disappointment to the Kaid in Khartoum. Yes, that was a

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grey day in the African war, and the affairs of the Emperor looked stale fiat and painfully unprofitable.

Matthews and I went off the next day on the long train journey to the front outside Kassala. It was a convivial train. The railway officer m charge had a suite with a bath, and there we would go in the evening to bathe and drink warm whisky until the train stopped at a convenient halt, when we would walk back along the track to our carriage. Food one either brought oneself and gave to one’s native boy to cook, or accepted what the railways had to provide. It was customary for the passenger to bring his own drinks, which were kept by the boy in some remote ice-chest on the train and produced before luncheon and dinner, rhe train brought life to the primitive grass-hut settlements in the interior. Natives swarmed up to the track to post and receive letters, gossip, and gather their merchandise. Passengers as green as we were would jump down and wander through the poor village bazaars and buy daggers made from bits of steel looted from the railway track. Extraordinary things were for sale at every halt— bundles of aromatic twigs used for the c eaning of teeth, camel sticks for guiding camels, sweetmeats violent in colour and taste. But these black Fuzzy Wuzzies, Hadendoas and Nubas were magnificent in physique, and after the riverine tribes of the lower Nile they appeared as a race revived and refreshed. Their teeth were perfect and they smiled constantly. No hawker pressed his wares or molested the stranger Their tight glossy skins shone with a luminous blackness, and the naked children played with a gaiety and vigour seldom seen south of the Egyptian border. They were as statuelque and natural as animals as they stood stork-like upon one leg, holding the other foot against the knee— a comfortable stance once you can manage it. The grass conical-shaped tukals in which the villagers lived were as natural and attractive as a field of wheat, and a relief to anyone used to the broken-down mud-hut villages of the Nile Delta. There was clean- liness and breath here. The Mohammedan, stricter than any town dweller, religiously spread his mat on the earth, washed himself from a stone water-jar as it is prescribed in the Koran, and prayed with a sincerity that made him oblivious to all that went on around him. Many of the adults worked on the railway— worked on tirelessly, regardless of growing age but dropping the labour as soon as they tired of it with childish irrelevance. They would go off to the villages for a month or two and then return to work again. I heard from the railway officer of one old man who was told he was too old to work. He protested he was only thirty-five— a point which he could not have proven, anyway, since the natives take no numerical account of the years. He was eventually given a job and worked stoutly at earring sleepers and rails. Then one day the overseer heard him chatting to his mates about the battle of Omdurman.

It appeared that he had fought Kitchener there.

Then, too, after months of dry heat in the Egyptian desert, we were

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seeing rain again — warm scented rain that deluged on the black cotton soil in the evenings, turning the ground into a muck and bringing a sense of relief after the long hot day. And trees appeared again as we advanced on Sennar Dam — thorn scrub, perhaps twenty feet high, the country of elephant and lion and baboons and antelope. Like schoolboys we rode across the roaring buttress of the dam in the cab of the loco- motive and watched the snow-white ibises rising in lazy clouds against just such a sunset as awed Churchill here over a generation ago. This was the Blue Nile that flows from Lake Tana in the heart of Abyssinia. Here at Sennar the annual flood is locked and released with such exacti- tude during the following dry season that engineers can assess almost to the inch how much water is flooding through the irrigation drains of the fellaheen in Lower Egypt, over a thousand miles away. The flood was early yet, but already the water thrashed through the sluices with a roar that drowned conversation. Later, the Blue Nile would rise to such strength that at the confluence at Khartoum the slower flooding White Nile would be forced to flow backwards. Then later again the White Nile that flows out of the rotting swamps in Central Africa would gain its own impetus and restore the current at Khartoum to its normal direction. Together, then, the White and Blue Niles would sweep on to the Mediterranean, bringing life to twenty million people. Icily it had been suggested that the Italians might withhold the supply from Lake Tana or even poison the water. The hugeness of Sennar alone denied that nonsense, and later in Khartoum I met a British officer who had explored the reaches of the Blue Nile for the express purpose of proving that theory false.

Near Gedaref we approached the front. Sometimes in this final stretch Matthews and I would go ahead of the train in a rattling petrol- driven trolley. This used to proceed to the next station after every halt to report washaways on the line — a frequent happening that sometimes held up the traffic for days. From the trolley we watched the antelope bounding across the line or stopped and followed the bell-like calls of the baboons through the trees.

Gedaref is a malarial spot where one sleeps beneath netting, and it is wise to wear long trousers and poke the turn-ups under your socks. Here on a cool windy hilltop the British had established divisional head- quarters in a wide verandahed villa.

Away southward, four days’ march by she-camel, lay one front at Gallabat. Northward at Kasm el Girba outside Kassala was the farthest point you could reach before the enemy. The Sudanese Defence Force was astride the Atbara River there, ready to blow up the bridge if the Italians came on. Gedaref itself was a bigger cluster of grass huts than usual. It was lightly held by native troops dressed in their one-piece knee- length khaki robes, khaki turbans and stout openwork leather sandals. The British officers ate bacon and eggs and marmalade, read the Bystander

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and the Taller and hoped for mail from home. They were hospitable, friendly , experienced men, feeling a little forgotten but apparently ready to carry on in this wilderness so long as it pleased some remote command thousands of miles away. It is never in London that you get a sense of Empire. It is here on the edges where they really do dress occasionally for dinner and cling pathetically to habits that were made in Eton and riccadiily. Its absurd, of course. And quite unusually stoical and brave. J

I was taken to see a group of about three hundred natives whose chief preoccupation up to the war had been horse-stealing and various orms of highway robbery. They were great marksmen, which was notable since before the war they had been forbidden to carry arms under threat of heavy punishment. They had come in readily to enlist, but when they were offered rifles they had shaken their heads emphatically, saying they had never seen such curious instruments before. Overacting heavily each man had insisted on being shown how to load and fire Then they were offered targets at three hundred yards. Each man plugged his entire clip of bullets clean through the bull’s-eye. Now they

were going off under a British officer behind the Italian lines to shoot up convoys. r

For the first and only time in the Middle East I rode up to the front on a railway. Nearing Kasm el Girba we saw small bomb-craters pitting one or two of the sidings. The line had not been hit, but Fascist aircraft were up, and once we had to stop and wait while a bomber cruised over. It was feared that at any moment a land raid might come across from the Eritrean border and cut the line. Nor was there any real reason whv Fascist aircraft might not have actually landed on the flat desert beside the railway in a thousand remote places. They might have tom up and ynamited miles of track. As it was, even their bombers never ventured low. Regularly at night the people in Atbara in central Sudan used to hear Italian communication planes riding high overhead. These were making the long twelve-hundred-mile flight between Eritrea and Libya. Ihe aircraft used to come down at Kufra oasis in southern Libya to refuel and then continue on over the Sudan to Asmara. The Sudan was defence- less to do anything about it. Little too could have been done to save the vital bridge over the Atbara-the bridge that carried all traffic from

gypt and the Red Sea to Khartoum — had a determined attack been made upon it.

But now, unmolested, we bowled down the line to the Atbara at Kasm el Girba. At that friendly mess we found the war languished. If the Italians failed to come on soon, the rains would start and it would be too late. It did not seem that they would come on. Only a few nights previously a British demolition squad, sent out to tear up a section of the railway track outside Kassala, had come on a squad of Italian sappers engaged on exactly the same job a little higher up the line. The Fascists,

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39

moreover, were digging machine-gun posts and breastworks for the defence of Kassala, and seemed to be in such a state of nerves that the noise of a British patrol at night was enough to make them cover the desert with heavy machine-gun fire. As for us, we were powerless to attack. Containing Kassala at that moment were exactly three companies. The Italians had perhaps a division or even more.

Life at Kasm el Girba moved calmly except for the bombing. Down in the river two officers were wading in the mud. Every few minutes they cast a circular native net into the fast-moving shallows. Then drawing the weighted ends of the net together, they hauled fat muddy fish on to the bank. The day before, a seventeen-foot crocodile had been shot, and gazelle meat was available. Far across the plain we could see Kassala clearly — a township partly European, mostly native, clustered under a great black hump of rock that rose startlingly out of the plain like a huge potted jelly that had been turned lately from the mould. That was Jebel Kassala, and a smaller jebel lay behind it — the most notable landmarks for hundreds of miles.

We dined that night in the open, fighting the insects and listening to the B.B.C. intoning from a set perched in a thorn-bush. It was a quiet war. We went back to Khartoum.

A successful attack was made against Massawa . . . one of our aircraft failed to return. — r.a.f. communique issued in Cairo, July 14.TH, 1940.

Three days later I was seeing all the fighting I cared for. Matthews and I had put in for a flight on a bombing raid and to our surprise it was granted. Such requests had always been turned down in France and England.

We flew down from Khartoum to R.A.F. headquarters, north of Kassala at Erkowit — an intolerable journey of four and a half hours in a rattling Valencia. Erkowit, about three thousand feet up in the Red Sea Hills, had a rest-house to which the overheated white people of the Sudan used to go to relax and cool off a litde. It recalls Mexico or the Texan desert. Cactus with long upward-reaching fingers grows out of the grey rocks. Lizards scutde in the shadows. Donkeys cart you around the barren hilltops. There was nothing to *ee, nothing to do, but the Governor-General of the Sudan and members of his staff had built themselves houses round about, and it was enough just to be cool. Now the rest-house was crowded with wives and children unable to make the

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usual summer-leave trip to England. Each night the R.A.F. officers used to come to the rest-house from their two steaming landing-fields on the plain below. There would be music and dancing and mild flirta- tion and drinking. From every direction on the dark cool terrace in the evening would come the voices of the guests shouting “ Walad,” which was the signal for a soft-footed native waiter to come up and take orders for the bar. Every day the British bombers would whirl up from the desert and fly off to Eritrea and Abyssinia. Old and few as the machines were, they were having it pretty much their own way against the Italian air force. And now to-day a squadron of Blenheims had come down from the Western Desert to lay on a few days of really intensive bom- bardment in order to distract the Fascists from an important convoy of ships which was due to sail up the Red Sea to Suez. Tired after the flight from Khartoum, Matthews and I went to bed in tents pitched beside the house. We had to be up at five-thirty the next morning since we were promised a flight in one of the raids which were to bomb Kassala throughout the following day.

There can, I think, be no exact analysis of fear or any complete assess- ment of courage. This raid as I know now was of little importance and less danger. But it was my first, and I went to bed that night with a little constriction in my throat, a faster, uncomfortable beating inside my chest. This was danger, I thought, asked for and accepted and one might be dead to-morrow. Or wounded or crashed somewhere beyond that jebel without water. One of the pilots had shown me a little card they all carried written in Amharic and English. It said something about the bearer being a British officer and asking that he be given food and water and taken to the nearest settlement. “ Since the bastards can’t read,” the pilot had said lightly, “ I guess some of the tribesmen will slice you up in the usual way and start asking questions afterwards.” He hadn’t seemed worried about it. And, strangely, neither did I. I was just afraid of being hit at all while in the air. I started examining this, searching round and round in my head for a way of dealing with myself, and I felt angry with myself and ashamed. This was the hard moment. In the morning it was not nearly so difficult.

An R.A.F. truck fetched us in the yellow early light, and down at the nearest landing field we bundled into the unaccustomed heaviness of flying kit and parachutes. Already the machines, some ten of them, had been “ bombed-up ” and now their engines were turning over in a scurry of desert dust. The wing commander was very precise. He had photographs of Kassala showing clearly the two jebels where the air currents were sometimes difficult ; the straggling native village a mass of grass huts ; the river Ga»h, now in yellow flood ; the rectangular compound of the railway yards which was our target. Inside the com- pound were neat lines of concrete tukals built in the shape of the other conical huts. These had been erected by the railway company to shelter

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native railway workers. Now it was believed that they housed Italian troops and native levies and our object was to bomb them out. Machine and possibly A.A. guns were noted at either end of the compound. We were to dive-bomb down to about three or four hundred feet. The aircraft would go out in flights of three.

I sweated in the hot flying kit as I walked over the far side of the field smoking a last cigarette with the flying officer who was leading our flight.

I will give this man a fictitious name, Watson. He was perhaps twenty- two or twenty-three. He was six root, unusually slim and boyish with dark hair and a serious shy face, and he had been very gay last night at the rest-house. Someone had said to him, “ I hear you are going to do something pretty intrepid to-morrow.” “ Yes,” he had said, “ pretty intrepid.” They had got the word out of some newspaper report and it was a joke among them to use it. I do not think that they ever felt brave. They felt tired or exhilarated or worried or hungry and occasion- ally afraid. But never brave. Certainly never intrepid. Most of them were completely unanalytical. They were restless and nervous when they were grounded for a day. They volunteered for every flight and of necessity some each day had to be left behind. They lived sharp vivid lives. Their response to almost everything— women,, flying, drinking, working — was immediate, positive and direct. They ate and slept well. There was little subtlety and still less artistry about what they did and said and thought. They had no time for leisure, no opportunity for introspection. They made friends easily. And never again after the speed and excitement of this war would they lead the lives they were once designed to lead. They were no material for peace.

So then Watson and Matthews, the other pilots and I climbed into three separate Blenheims and squeezed down among the instruments. We carried no observer, so there was a spare seat for both Matthews and me with a good view. Matthews was in the left-hand machine, Watson in the centre, and myself in the right being piloted by a laconic young Canadian who handed me a stick of chewing-gum— a welcome thing at that moment. I wanted now only to get into the air. But one of the other machines heaved and stopped in its take-off. A tyre was punctured, and endlessly, it seemed, we waited for the wheel to be changed. Then quite suddenly we were off— Watson first, us next, then the third machine ; and soon all three were coasting evenly over the dried-up land in an immaculate Vee. There was a flight of an hour and a half to the target- ninety minutes of pondering what it would be like. I hated that ride. It was slightly bumpy, and the other machines, so close that one felt their wings would touch, kept rising and sinking out of sight. I watched the other rear gunners spinning their glassed-in turrets in search of enemy aircraft. I traced the path of the Gash River and the thin ribbon of railway that led us to Kassala. I tried to work out the meanings of the dials before me. But it was no good. There was nothing to do, nothing 2*

\

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to arrest the mind and lift it up and away from its dread and senseless apprehension.

In despair I fingered my wrist-watch again and again, believing it must have stopped. Then, unexpectedly, my Canadian bumped me on the arm and pointed ahead. There was Kassala breaking through the ground mist. There the jebels, there the town, there the railway yards. And in a few seconds we were going down to bomb. It wasn’t necessary to wait any more. With huge overwhelming relief I leaned over for a fuller view. As I moved, the three aircraft dipped in a long easy dive and, inexplicably, I was suddenly lifted with a wave of heady excitement, more sensuous than release from pain, faster than the sating of appetite, much fuller than intoxication. I felt keyed to this thing as a skier balancing for his jump or a surfer taking the first full rush of a breaker. There was no drawing back nor any desire for anything but to rush on, the faster the better. Now the roar of the power-dive drowned even these sensations, and with the exhilaration of one long high-pitched school- boy’s veil we held the concrete huts in the bomb sights and let them have the first salvo. I saw nothing, heard no sound of explosion, as the machine with a great sickening lurch came out of the dive and all the earth— -jebels, township, clouds and desert — spun round and sideways through the glass of the cockpit. Then, craning backward, I glimpsed for a second the bomb smoke billowing up from the centre of the com- pound. It all looked so marvellously easy then — not a human being in sight on the brown earth below ; all those ten thousand men huddled in fear of us in the ground. A burst of tracer shells skidded past the slanting windows of the cockpit. So they were firing from the ground then, and it meant nothing. Nothing now could interrupt the attack. Already Watson was shaping for his second run and closer in this time. We followed him into the dive, skidding first left then right at over three hundred m.p.h. to throw off the aim of the gunners below. Then the straightening at last for the final swoop dead on to the target. This time I heard the machine-gun spouting from the leading edge of our machine, felt the lift as the load of bombs was released and heard again the rear gunner blasting from his turret as the aircraft nosed upward into the sky again. Watson was away ahead on a long sweep round the jebels and into Eritrea trying to pick up transport on the roads leading back to Asmara and we followed him hotly. But everything back along the yellow grey country was quiet. Over the border even the villagers were pressed to the ground in terror of the raid. We turned at length, all three of us, for the last attack, flying back over a forest to the west of the town. Coming now at this new angle we found new points to bomb, and faintly Watson’s salvo sounded through our motors as we came down for the last time. Looking across as he dived, I saw where his star- board wing was ripped in two places and the fuselage was peeling back under the force of the wind. Then again the earth was turning and

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pitching as we came out of it and I felt sick. Sick, and nursing a roaring headache. Like that I was borne up and out of it into the pure air beyond the ground-fire, beyond harm’s way. I experienced pleasure then, calmer but deeper than my earlier excitement. To have had that dread, to have lost it in excitement at the crisis, and now to have come sailing back safely into this clean open sky — that was much and more than one could ever have foreseen. In a lazy pleasurable daze I sat back through the journey home. I could have laughed at anything then. It was all very intrepid. As we came down toward the home field three more aircraft setting out for Kassala passed us in the air. Three more were warming up on the ground. We made an easy landing. My Canadian slid back the trans- parent roof. I stepped out along the wing, caught my foot in a piece of splintered fuselage and fell flat on my face on the ground.

While we slept and wrote and enjoyed life at the rest-house Watson went up again that day on reconnaissance far down the Red Sea. At Massawa he came on a dangerous thing : a concentration of Italian warships. His neat square photographs showed at least two destroyers and a cruiser and two or three submarines tied up around the mole. And still our convoy was not safely through the Red Sea. It was decided to organize an attack on the harbour at once, drawing the Wellesley squadron at Port Sudan into the action as well. Watson, having had the honour of discovering the enemy, pleaded to go out on the opening dawn raid the following day. By now his brimming eagerness, his modesty and his laughter had made him specially interesting to us. Among so many it was always valuable in writing dispatches to attach your descrip- tions to some personality. The story gained point and clarity that way. And since the correspondent was not permitted by the censorship to mention a man’s name, it did not matter that there were a hundred others like him. One man stood for all. So now I fixed on Watson. He was a strange lad in that part of his character that had never yet had a chance to develop. Girls scared him. It was naturally a joke among his friends. When his squadron leader married one of two sisters at Alexandria, Watson was induced to act as best man and in an agony of embarrassment attended the bride’s sister at the wedding. There you are, the others told him afterward, there is a fine girl for you. Watson ret aliated to his squadron’s astonishment by announcing quietly a little later that he was engaged to marry the girl. Now here he was in the Sudan waiting for leave to go back and get married and filling his days with high adventure.

Genock had joined us and saw at once he might use this attack to get a film that had never been taken before — action shots of a dive-bomber taken from the bomber itself. There was no room for him in the first raids so he attached his camera to one of the rear gunners’ turrets, focused and sighted it and arranged a button which the gunner had only to push when he went into action. Off went the first flights in the morning.

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They came against opposition so stiff that the gunner was too busy and too preoccupied to press Genock’s button. Genock himself got a seat and went out, but he too found the pace too hot, the action too fleeting and erratic to allow him to focus. Reconnaissance photographs taken after the first day’s blitz showed some hits, but still the Italian warships were there. And now the three squadrons— the two in the Red Sea Hills and the other at Port Sudan — felt baulked and stirred up in their determination to have the Italian ships. ^Watson after two long flights in the one day, including well over an hour over the target, had blood- shot eyes and his wing commander would have laid him off had he not again pleaded so strongly to go on.

Matthews and I flew down to Port Sudan to watch the other squadron operating. The town festered in a humid shade temperature of no degrees and sometimes more. In the cockpits of the aircraft patrolling down the Red Sea the temperature rose sometimes to 130 degrees. Many in the town were suffering from prickly heat, the rash which botches your face and arms and back with red scabs. The water in the pool at the front of the Red Sea Hotel was so warm that it was a slight relief in the evening to emerge from it into the less warm air. In the hotel it was wise to fill your bath in the evening so that by the morning the standing water would have dropped a degree or two below the temperature of the flat hot fluid that steamed out of the tap. One wondered how the crews of submarines in the Red Sea got along.

We watched the Wellesleys take off, great ungainly machines with a single engine and a vast wing spread, but with a record of security that was astonishing. For weeks now they had been pushing their solitary engines across some of the most dangerous flying country in the world — country where for hours you could not make a landing and where the natives were unfriendly to the point of murder— and they had been coming back. Often their great wings were slashed and torn with flying shrapnel. Sometimes they just managed to struggle back with controls shot away and the undercarriage would collapse, bringing the machine lurching down on the sand on one wing like some great stricken bird. But always they seemed to get back somehow. Now again on this second day of the attack on Massawa the control room at Port Sudan got signals that some of our aircraft had been sorely hit. We knew how many aircraft had gone out. It was a strain counting them as they came in, knowing always from hour to hour that there were still due three or two or perhaps just one machine and the chances of the lost airmen ever getting back were diminishing from minute to minute. In the late afternoon we first heard, then saw, the last flight over the sea. They cast their recognition flares then two of the three aircraft fell behind. The progress of the leading machine was very slow. It was obvious that since this was the one most badly hit it had been sent on ahead to make its landing as quickly and as best it could. It circled twice, then settled

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for the landing. Crack went one wheel ; down in the sand went the engine ; over on one wing went the whole machine. The ambulance, fire-brigade wagons, doctors and ground staff raced across the aerodrome. Out of the machine almost unharmed came the crew.

There were many incidents like that in the days that followed. The old Wellesleys were cracking up and we had no newer aircraft to replace them. They were too slow. Always the Italian fighters would wait over Massawa until one machine more badly hit than the others would lag behind. Then the enemy fighters would come and give it hell. That happened to a young squadron leader who after months of staff work on the ground had asked to take part in this all-important raid. He was given the job of rear gunner and his guns were blown away. The pilot was hit. The airman manning the two makeshift guns that sprouted out of the belly of the machine was mortally wounded. The squadron leader fixed a tourniquet, tightened it with his revolver, and got the dying man to hold it in place. Then he manned the two side guns until the pilot, lacking blood, was failing. Then the squadron leader took over the controls. That machine, too, came back though they lifted out of it a dead man still holding the revolver that tightened his tourniquet.

I had to go back to Khartoum. Into the Grand Hotel there came Watson at last with a bandage round his arm and a spell of leave. He had got his submarines. The British convoy had got through to Suez.

There was a wedding in Alexandria a little later. Watson went off with his bride for a week. The week after he was on his way back to the Sudan. He was last seen going down on to that spot in Massawa harbour where the warships he had attacked lay wrecked and awash.

4

I intend to act offensively. — admiral Cunningham.

All through this early period Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham had been becoming more active in the Mediterranean. I had lunched with the Admiral some months before in Malta, and had come away from the meeting so inspired that I suggested to my paper that I should be allowed to join the Mediterranean Fleet as a Naval Correspondent. This was in January 1940 when as correspondent in Rome I had been finding things slack and had induced the Naval Attache there, Sir Philip Bowyer- Smythe, to submit a proposal to the Admiralty that I should make a tour

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of the Mediterranean on British warships to observe how the blockade was being enforced. Both the Admiralty and my paper agreed, and at the end of January 1940 I had flown down from Rome to Malta by the Italian Ala Littoria Line. Ala Littoria aircraft were obliged to stick to set schedules and to cross to Malta from Sicily only a few feet above the sea. They were also required to avoid the Grand Harbour and fly between the island of Gozo and Malta before making a brief landing on the more southerly of the island’s airports. Nevertheless there was no doubt that already in that January the Italians were keeping a close check on Malta through their pilots, and the Italian Consul in Valetta was using this convenient Fascist airline to send Rome all the information he could about our defences.

In Malta the Navy had greeted me with an efficiency and understand- ing for which I was pathetically grateful after so many hostile months in Italy. To get properly served bacon and eggs and tea and toast again before a coal fire and hear the English language all round me was a vision of home. After going round the island’s defences (an Admiral’s barge my transport) I was put aboard the destroyer flagship Galatea. For ten days we steamed off Italy and round the mouth of the Adriatic picking up freighters, searching them and directing some into Malta. It was afl done with a dispatch and judgment and a taste for adventure that promised well for the great months ahead. Though Italy, of course, was not yet at war we travelled blacked out, and action stations were called with precision at sunset. But it was a gay voyage for me with a crew which had the reputation of being one of the most friendly and amusing of any in the Navy. I spent hours on the quarter-deck talking with Vice-Admiral Tovey about Italian opera and politics and books. He then had no inkling that he was to be appointed to the command of the Home Fleet, and was feeling slightly baffled at being left in the Mediterranean while most of his destroyers had been taken away from him for service in more dangerous waters to the north. I spent long hours on the bridge, where the captain, on sighting other vessels, had con- stantly to take snap decisions which all affected the tortuous diplomatic game Whitehall was then playing in Italy and the Balkans. We picked up all manner of craft — Jugoslav freighters sneaking down the Dalmatian coast, Greek contraband runners lurking in the mouth of the Corinth Canal waiting for us to pass so they could make a dash for the open sea, Italian merchantmen bound for the east, Turks coming west. Once we stopped an evacuating Balkan royalty. Always we hoped to grab some Nazi agent and his papers aboard a neutral ship.

Always we were busy, and twice I had to abandon a speech I was making to the ship’s company on the quarter-deck when the cry came down from the masthead, “ Ship ahoy ! ”

For some reason I remember clearly this incident of Mulvaney, the captain’s personal servant. In a vulgarly brilliant sunset we had sighted

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a small sailing vessel heading down the Adriatic. Her master responded neither to flags or Morse, and, since he might have been carrying even a few tons of valuable contraband, Galatea decided to run alongside and question the stranger, through a megaphone. The Admiral’s A.D.C., die officer with the most powerful voice aboard, was summoned to the bridge. The great grey cruiser and the tiny freighter, her sails dripping gold from the over-gaudy sunset, drew together. The freighter flew no flag, and her master, now genuinely disturbed, leaned over the bridge- rail not two hundred yards from us. “ Who are you ? Where are you going ? ” yelled the A.D.C in English. The master shook his head, unable to understand. “ Qui etes-vous ? Ou allez-vous ? Again no response, and Galatea, not holding the slow pace, slid past. As we turned to come up on the other vessel’s port side, Galatea s captain said briefly, “ Try him in 'Italian.” The A.D.C. answered limply he had no It alian, and I was instructed to help by giving the A.D.C. the Italian for the questions he was to shout. It worked well enough. We got the answer back he was an Italian freighter bound from Leghorn to Genoa with a cargo of wheat. It seemed genuine enough, and he was too small fry to cause us further delay, so the captain decided he could proceed. “What is the Italian for ‘All right’? he asked me. “Just say ‘ Va bene,’ ” I told the A.D.C. He, not hearing correctly, shouted into wind at the top of his lungs, “ Mulvaney.” Out of the captain’s sea cabin shot Mulvaney the steward, rigid at the salute. Over on the sailing ship the Italian master was shouting quite happily, “ Va bene, and pursuing his course. We all looked steadily at Mulvaney for a moment. “ All right, Mulvaney,” said the captain dryly, “ I just want a cup of tea.”

All this was luxury to me. I had sailed these same waters only a year or two before in dirty downtrodden tramps during the Spanish War. I had been trying to discover whose were the mystery submarines which were sinking our vessels off the north coast of Africa (they were Italian all right). At Algiers I had joined the German tramp Achaea, and had had many a talk with her fat captain on the long trip up through the Straits of Messina to Piraeus and the Dardanelles. Even then in 1938 he would end every conversation with, “ It is impossible to continue. The English will not understand. It will be war. You might think nothing of my little ship, but she will be minelaying or patrolling or doing some- thing in the service of the Fiihrer.” Well, Achaea wasn t doing much. I had seen her only a month before I had joined Galatea, when I had made an overland trip up to Venice and Trieste, at the head of the Adriatic. Tied up and mouldering without a crew or a cargo in Trieste docks, I had found Achaea and half a dozen other German vessels. They were botded up there by just such patrols as this the Galatea was making.

I returned to Malta enthusiastic about the British blockade. Admiral Cunningham, then in command at Malta, had me to lunch at Admiralty House. Sitting on the terrace there with his family, I found it easy to

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talk, as it always is with men of unusual talent. He was engrossed in Balkan politics and the possibilities of Mussolini’s devious politics. Like Tovey, he, too, seemed to me restless for action.

When I met him again seven months later at Alexandria that quick, slight, electric figure was in the thick of it. That was in August 1940. The Italian war had been going two months. I had left the Sudan to return to Egypt, and when I got to Cairo I was told to join the fleet in Alexandria. This was something new. Through the last war and the first months of this the Navy had set its face against publicity. But now it was seen at the Admiralty that propaganda had to be used to counter the German broadcasts, and since the Navy was going to be written about anyway it had better be reported at first hand. I was posted to the flagship Warspite and went at once to see Ajdmiral Cunningham. Action and responsibility had made small but very definite changes in him. He was obviously enjoying life. He sat at his desk in his sea cabin under Warspite s towering bridge-works dressed in white shirt, shorts and socks. He had colour in the flat cheeks criss-crossed with tiny red veins. His cornflower blue eyes were brisk and alight. He talked no politics. He hinted briefly that we were going to undertake an unusually important sweep through the Mediterranean, told me that I would get every assistance, and asked me to say there and then what I wanted. I wanted nothing but a handy place to watch what was going to happen, and they sent me up to the searchlight platform just astern of the Admiral’s bridge. There, occasionally during the days ahead, Cunningham would come across for a few words and to drop information.

We steamed out of Alexandria in the early morning past the five sullen captive French warships at anchor there. Coming out of the overheated mess deck at daylight I saw how big this venture was. The whole Alexandrine fleet was out. It was 6 a.m., and at that moment the sky was flaming pink, the sea jet black, and the whole great steel arrow- head was pointed down the shaft of the rising sun toward Italy. Astern of Warspite steamed Eagle, the old converted aircraft-carrier, and closely following her Malaya, huge, castle-like and lifting rhythmically up and below the line of Eagle’s wide flight-deck. Starboard and port of us steamed lines of cruisers, some of the great names of this war, Gloucester and Liverpool, Orion and Sydney and Ajax. Beyond them in a great pro- tective Vee that stretched to the horizon were the destroyers. Forward and astern of the whole fleet flew Eagle’s reconnaissance aircraft, looking for submarines and enemy warships and aircraft.

Warspite was like a central telephone exchange. There were never less than two lines of flags going up or coming down the signalling masthead, never less than two or three lamps flashing out Morse ; never less than half a dozen other ships signalling us with lamp and flag. Orders poured out of Cunningham's office ; information poured in. It was a brilliant thing to see the order go out for the whole fleet to change

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direction, bringing each ship into a different position. Far out on the horizon the destroyers would weave in and out between one another ; cruisers would cut suddenly across our bows or drop behind ; Eagle and Malaya, following doggedly astern, would start upon new directions. For a few minutes ships seemed to be steaming helter-skelter anywhere over the ocean as disorganized as a river picnic. Then it would come out straight again — the wide Vee, the battleships coasting along steadily in the centre. And always each ship kept swinging starboard and port in her course every so often, to throw lurking enemy submarines off their line of fire.

Three days of this and nothing much happened. The Italians were well aware something was doing. Shadowing planes — usually old Cant flying-boats that hugged the surface of the sea — kept following in our wake. As often as Eagle sent out fighting aircraft to destroy them another shadower would turn up again. There was a story told of how the Admiral summoned one of our giant Sunderland flying-boats to deal with one of these tiny shadowers. The Sunderland swept up and over the fleet on her mission. Presently she reported, “ Sighted Cant flying- boat.” Then later, “ Destroyed Cant.” The Admiral signalled back, “ You big bully.”

Toward the third evening one of our scouting planes returned with the news that the Italian fleet, with two battleships and seven cruisers screened by destroyers, was steaming straight toward us at fifteen knots. It seemed that a decisive action was certain, and that unless we or they changed course we should meet in the darkness about i a.m. Here, then, was a major decision for Cunningham to take. He was out- numbered arid probably outgunned ; he was within a short distance of Italian bases from which new enemy vessels, submarines and aircraft might be called up within an hour or two. More important than either consideration was the fact that night actions are risky, uncertain affairs, where luck might defeat training and the best gunnery in the world might be overreached in the obscurity of a battle fought in the darkness. One factor helped Cunningham to his decision — every man on this, his own ship, and I believe on every other vessel under his command, was eager for an encounter after training for so many years for a meeting just such as this. But an engagement would deter the fleet from its m*ain object, and, holding that point in mind, Cunningham decided neither to seek nor avoid action. The fleet was to continue on its course, which was then obliquely approaching the Italians. If we met the enemy in the night, then we would fight him.

The decision delighted everybody. Officers in the wardroom, men in the galley, bolted their dinners and hurried on deck wrapping great- coats over their white tropical shorts and shirts. Torpedoes were swung seawards for action. Searchlights were spun round ready to push their beams across the sea. A stream of signals flashed from Warspite’s bridge,

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bringing the rest of the fleet into position for battle before their silhouettes vanished into the darkness. The wind rose sharply, and soon cascades of ack water were seething over the bows past the fifteen-inch guns which stood loaded and ready. Stumbling in the darkness round the decks, I

excit dl Un<^re<^S mCn were laughing, whisding, yarning

Ten hours later in the first light of the new day they were still there, u Italans were not- Somewhere in the night the enemy had changed course and disappeared. Our dawn air-patrol found them at length well on their way home to Italy. But a British submarine struck farst. Roaming by chance well ahead of the British fleet on an inde- pendent course, she had reached the Italian battle squadron in the failing hght the mght before. Two torpedoes were launched, and before the British commander dived he ascertained through the periscope that one Italian cruiser at least had been hit. It was one of the most important successes of British submarines in the Mediterranean since Italy had declared war. Still after this, had the Italian fleet wanted action on terms greatly favouring itself, there was nothing to stop it. Over- whelmingly large numbers of aircraft could have reached us within an hour. As it was, the enemy waited until it was too late.

During these first three days we were distracting the attention of the enemy from a convoy bound for Malta. The attack when it did come on the convoy was a half-hearted one, as all the Italian attacks were. The steering-gear of one of the merchant ships was damaged, and she made port. All the high brown cliffs surrounding Malta’s Grand Harbour were thronged with cheering excited Maltese as the warships steamed in at last with their convoy. After many anxious weeks of isolation these ships brought life and hope to the island. It was solid proof to the Maltese that they were not being deserted. It was the first of the big wartime convoys, the first of many that have been going there ever since.

But outside Malta s Grand Harbour something much bigger yet was happening. Only the night before I had been told that here under the very lee of Italy a rendezvous had been arranged. To buttress Cunning- ham s relatively weak position in the Mediterranean the Admiralty had ordered to his command its newest aircraft-carrier Illustrious together with her forty-odd high-speed Fulmar fighting aircraft, the two anti- aircraft cruisers Coventry and Calcutta, with the battleship Valiant, escort- ing destroyers and supply ships. These new vessels almost doubled Cunningham s striking power. Better still, they meant air protection from the Italian raiders which had been harassing his ships whenever they put to sea. They had made the voyage from England with nothing worse than light raids. They had passed unharmed through the field of mines which the Italians had declared they had laid from Sicily, past the island of Pantelleria, to Libya. And now, exactly on the appointed hour,

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while we watched and waited tensely aboard Warspite, the huge square hulk of Illustrious heaved steadily over the horizon framed in a back- ground of Malta’s brown misty cliffs.

No ship like Illustrious had ever been seen in the Mediterranean before ; nothing of its kind, so fast, so modern, so reassuring. Emotion- ally, sailors cheered as they saw her, and gazed and gazed across the flat steady water much as a schoolboy will look at a new motor-car his father has brought home. Then other smudges on the horizon resolved into Valiant towering above Illustrious and the attendant cruisers and destroyers. Cunningham signalled his welcome to all of them. Then, since we were within half an hour’s flight of the enemy, there was a brisk business of getting the new vessels into line. Illustrious steamed into the place of honour behind the flagship, with Valiant, Malaya and Eagle following. The rest of the ships, a Grand Fleet now, took up position on the flanks. Within fifteen minutes of sighting us, Illustrious had flown off two of the new two-hundred-and-forty-miles-per-hour Fulmars. They set out on a slow flight round the fleet to accustom the Mediter- ranean gunners to their appearance, but, sighting two Italian aircraft on their way, shot them down and returned to their parent ship. In two minutes they had vanished on electric lifts into the belly of the aircraft carrier. The whole operation had taken ten minutes. Grinning widely, a sailor walked over the hangar on Warspite which housed two ancient hundred-mile-an-hour Swordfish fighters and scrawled on the doorway, “ This way to the museum.” There was a great feeling of exhilaration around the fleet that morning.

And then the Italians came. They attacked with aircraft, mines and submarines, a new kind of naval warfare. From the Sicilian airfields they kept sending up small waves of bombers, flying very high and fast. Beneath the sea, meanwhile, enemy submarines were reported from several different directions and mines were bobbing to the surface. I was standing on the searchlight platform when the first salvo of bombs came down. A curtain of grey smoke and spray, mast-high, blotted out Illustrious steaming only a few hundred yards astern. Then another salvo, smaller bombs this time, reared up the sea along Warspite. Then single fountains spurted from among the cruisers and destroyers. Liver- pool's guns were the first to hit back. One after another the other war- ships synchronized their pom-poms and ack-ack guns into the concert of the fleet’s barrage. On Warspite you saw first smoke from the muzzles, then flames, then, seconds later it seemed, you felt the impact of the explosion that lifted your feet from the deck.

Far out to the horizon ships were racing to new positions making sudden turns and dashes. The destroyers, like wild cats tearing up the sea, dashed between the larger vessels to get at the enemy submarines. Each depth charge — they were exploding very deep — sent slow trembling blasts across the sea. Here ana there ships were sent off to explode

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floating mines with their pom-poms. Illustrious was working at speed. ofdSanfaTr SeT ^ ^ ^ deck’ “d 1 CaUght S^P**

All this action was scattered and spread over a long period, and, since few had any clear idea of what was going on, the flagship’s com- mander would broadcast reports over the ship’s microphone. It was part of an excellent psychological understanding that men fight better if they know what and how they are fighting and with what support. Ine commander finished each broadcast report with the words, “ This is the end. Once he announced, “ Large numbers of Italian aircraft are expected m five minutes time. This is the end.” A shout of laughter went from one end of the battleship to the other.

Then late in the afternoon there was an incident that brought the 1 j 1 l° a ,S e' There had been another near miss beside the battleship, and shrapnel was rattling down on the deck when I got a perfect glimpse of the silver wings of five enemy machines flying in the clear sunlight thirteen or fourteen thousand feet up. At once Warspite’s four-inch guns went into action. One silver plane slowly detached itself from the rest, turned from silver to black, then flaring yellow as it crashed headlong into the sea. As it hit the water a dense pillar of billowing black smoke spurted a hundred feet into the sky. Shell-bursts were ringing the other our raiders very closely now. Soon another machine lost height and speed and finally spun down, a burning moth before the flame of the late afternoon sun. After it, falling like white ashes through the black smoke, came three parachutists. Along with thousands of British sailors 1 watched fascmated, as the white dots hovered delicately into the sea to drown. Two British fighters cruised over the dying Italian pilots and with wide graceful sweeps alighted on Illustrious. The fight was

That night the fleet split up, one half going straight back to Alex- andria, the rest, including Illustrious and her attendant ack-ack cruisers following Warspite into a new adventure that was to prepare the way for the later victory at Taranto. We were bomid for Rhodes.

The Dodecanese Islands were still a mystery at this time. They were known to harbour Italy’s yet untried E-boats for which the Fascists had ong been hinting great things. The E-boat was something that especi- ally appealed to the flamboyant and individualistic Italian nature. Count lanos father, Admiral Constanzo Ciano, had already in the last war stirred every Italian s imagination by his daring strokes in the Adriatic. With the use of small motor-boats he had taken torpedoes right into the Austrian anchorages and succeeded almost single-handed in sinking two major warships. When I was in Italy there was much talk of “ death’s head volunteers who were willing actually to sit astride torpedoes and guide them on to their targets. The project meant death if the rider stayed too long aboard the torpedo, or capture if he managed to slip off

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into the water a little before the explosion took place. But the E-boat was the practical expression of this desire for fast, stealthy night raiding which brought spectacular results if successful and cost little in life or material if it failed. So the E-boat was designed to travel at speeds of over forty knots, launch at least two torpedoes whilst travelling at this high speed, and then race quickly to safety. Its range was small, its crew a handful of highly trained men. In so small a sea as the Mediterranean the Italians hoped much from these tactics, and at least two hundred E-boats were reputed to be ready when Mussolini declared war.

The Dodecanese was furthermore an ideal pirate’s nest to harbour these boats in addition to submarines and aircraft. All of them could make raids on British and neutral vessels trading up to Greece and the Dardanelles from the Suez Canal.

Rhodes, when I had last landed there from a Turkish merchantman in the spring of 1939, was still a dreaming summer island of roses and wine, of fisherfolk and holiday-makers, peaceful monasteries and pine forests. But even then Mussolini was preparing it for war. Two landing fields, one at Maritza, the other at Calato, with satellite fields in other parts of the island, had already been prepared. An energetic governor, Count Da Vecchi, had been sent across from Italy, and in an excess of the usual Fascist passion for building he was busily engaged in tearing down his predecessor’s public works and putting up his own instead. There was a fine new opera and cinema house, new quays, new roads ringing the island, and the big hotel on Rhodes harbour, the Albergo delle Rose, had been remodelled in yellowish sandstone on grandiose lines. Only the lovely forts and buildings of the Knights of St. John remained the same, though some of them were destined to be turned into air-raid shelters. At the Albergo delle Rose in 1939 I found the bar, the terraces and the beach swarming with Fascist officers and German tourists* I was in fact offered the room occupied only a week or two before by Dr. Goebbels and I slept very soundly in it for three nights. Apart from a few Maltese fishermen, who still clung to their British nationality despite the special tax imposed upon them, the only Englishman on the island was the British Consul, a tough old sea captain who was much per- turbed at the continuous influx of soldiers and the aircraft which he then estimated to number about two hundred.

I attempted to take the ferry northward to Leros, the island which had been especially developed as a submarine base, but was firmly told that the boat was booked out indefinitely. It seemed, too, that Stampalia, the island farther west, was being organized as an additional air and sea base. Rhodes itself sported four submarines, but these were forced to sail out of the town’s exposed harbour to the northern shores of the island when any sort of a wind was blowing out of Africa. Here,; as everywhere I have been in the Fascist Empire, it was impossible not to admire the Italian genius for fine buildings, roads, ports and public works.

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They built with skill and artistry, and only that strained nervous atmo- sphere that followed Fascism everywhere indicated that this was a civiliza- tion of the master for the master which the resident subject peoples must accept and support or else . . .

Up to the time of my voyage in Warspite Rhodes had never been raided. Its aircraft had made one or two attacks on Haifa and Alexandria, but nothing of any importance. And now we were steaming past Crete in a generous warm sea to bait the Italians in Rhodes and see what opposition they could offer to a naval and air force coming unexpectedly on them in the night.

The plan was for the Illustrious and Eagle pilots to combine in attacking the two airfields at Maritza and Calato, while the cruisers Orion and Sydney with two destroyers shelled the adjacent island of Scarpanto lying to the south-west.

An hour before sunrise the fleet was in position. One after another, ® ver fifty miles of ocean, one could see the dark shapes of warships detach themselves from the sea mist. One after another fighters and bombers were brought up to the flight-decks of the aircraft carriers and flown off until there were some twenty or thirty in the dark sky. This take-off in the half-dark was dangerous, and one aircraft, its engine failing at the crucial moment, poised for a second on the lip of Illustrious s flight-deck, then plunged sickeningly into the sea to be cut to pieces by the warship s bows. While this was happening Sydney was already in action. She was stealing round the island of Kaso to get at an airfield at the southern tip of Scarpanto when three or four E-boats emerged and, apparently caught by surprise, were forced into action. The E-boat commanders at once went into full speed, heading straight towards Sydney. Svdney, at several thousand yards’ range, engaged and blew the first E-boat in a sheet of flame out of the water before she had time to fire or even aim her torpedoes. An attendant destroyer, Ilex, cut in to protect Sydney, demolished a second E-boat, and forced two others, apparently Hit, to retire into Kaso. Sydney methodically went ahead with her shelling, while her sister Orion carried out a similar bombard- ment on the other side of the island at Pegadia Bay.

The importance of the action was, of course, that it showed the E-boat could be sighted and destroyed in daylight before it could even get into action. Provided he had air protection, Cunningham thereafter “d a clear indication that he could approach Italian coasts with no fear of this new weapon. The point was to be proved even more completely in later actions off Malta and Gibraltar.

The second half of the Admiral s plan also went forward with unex- pected success— again largely the result of surprise. At Calato the sleep- ing Italian garrison awoke to find itself beneath a major air attack. The petrol dump and the barracks were blazing and half a dozen aircraft burning on the ground. At Maritza, the other field lying under a

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monastery in a cup of the hills, five-hundred-pound bombs went straight through the main hangars. Workshops and barracks took fire, and another petrol tank engulfed in the flames precipitated a whole series of explosions which trailed black smoke across the horizon clearly visible to us eighty miles away. Italian airmen, recovering from their first shock, ran from the blazing barracks and took off in time to bring down four of our Swordfish which were trying to return to their mother ship.

We expected some stiffer reprisal than this. It came at io a.m. when the Fascist bombers now out in force found the fleet steaming for Alexandria. The first salvo of bombs came straight out of the sun and thrust up a green wall of water to the starboard of Warspite. The fleet’s guns opened with an aching, shuddering crash. Shells were bursting everywhere over the whole bowl of the sky from one horizon to the other. I was caught typing behind one of the four-inch guns, and the typewriter flew from my hands among a pile of books and pictures that tumbled to the floor. Bits of shrapnel spattered the deck, and I ducked and ran for the fifteen-inch gun turrets where I remained all morning watching the fight. By noon the Italians had had enough, and as they came out of the zone of British gunfire Illustrious % fighters leaped in. They had two Italian bombers down in ten minutes, and three more disappeared, casting off bits of fuselage as they went.

In all we had destroyed some twenty enemy aircraft. Warspite s chaplain came down to the mess cabin in the evening to post his text for the day : “ We came into Rhodes.” Next morning we were in Alexandria. Not a single warship had been hit throughout.

I trace the turning of the tide in the naval war in the Mediterranean from that one brilliant week. Many things had been done for the first time — a convoy had been got through to Malta ; reinforcements had been brought straight through the Mediterranean instead of round the Cape ; the E-boat had been proven of little worth in daylight ; the Italian bombers had been shown to be inaccurate, slow and unwilling to press their attacks home ; and finally the pirates’ nest at Rhodes had been badly shaken up.

With this experience to guide him, Cunningham was soon appearing off Taranto with his fleet air arm to cripple nearly half a dozen enemy warships at anchor there. Throughout the winter he was coming close inshore to bombard the whole length of the Libyan coast. Only the long-drawn-out agony of the crippling of Illustrious by German dive- bombers marred ms inevitable progress to the battle of Cape Matapan when another seven of Italy’s best ships were demolished.

Matapan was the Mediterranean’s last great naval battle. The fate of Illustrious had been an earnest that the whole character of the sea war was changing. German dive-bombers off Greece and Crete put an end to Cunningham’s brief but brilliant anachronism that capital ships and air- craft-carriers can operate in a land-locked sea. The Italians had never

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really believed in that principle. The Italian Navy had no aircraft- carriers. It relied on numerous convenient air bases in Sardinia, Sicily, Libya, the Dodecanese and Italy itself. For the rest it put its faith in E-boats, submarines, fast hght torpedo-boats and destroyers. Its thirty- five-thousand-ton battleships like Littorio, though of fine design, evoked nothing from the Italian talent for short, sharp, stealthy action. The Italian Navy suffered deeply from inexperience and the Italian high command knew it. It could not hope to use battleships as cruisers and cruisers as destroyers, the way Cunningham did.

So for ten extraordinary months, from June 1940 to April 1941, the British Navy ruled the Mediterranean with a daring and judgment that possibly eclipsed anything of its kind at sea before. It was not that the Italian Navy was no good at all. It was simply that the British fleet, taking many borderline risks, was brilliant. Cunningham deliberately spread a zest for attack. As he was sailing out of Alexandria to attack Taranto he signalled his other ships, “ I intend to act offensively in the Ionian Sea.” He was deeply admired. Nor did he take his losses during this venturesome sea period of the Mediterranean war. It was when he could no longer act offensively, when he had to convoy to and from Crete and Greece and elsewhere and came at last against overwhelming air power overwhelmingly pressed home, that he lost one good ship after another. From Crete onward it became blindingly obvious that sea and air would have to go together. The fleet could not put to sea without air protection. Except for submarines and light fast surprise raids by destroyers, the purely sea period was done. A bigger, more intricate, scheme of operation binding ship and plane had to be devised. Fleets alone cannot act offensively and get away with it. Neither the Bismarck nor any other battleship could range the seas, raiding, hunting down its foes, bombarding up the Main. Which is a pity, for every great captain, Cunningham included, is at heart a pirate.

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Iti the Western Desert elements Oj our forces are now in contact with the enemy on a broad front. In an engagement south of Sidi Barrani we have captured 500 prisoners. — general wavell’s first communique

ANNOUNCING HIS OFFENSIVE INTO CYRENAICA, DECEMBER 9TH, I94O.

By early winter 1940 Mussolini was already in difficulties in 'Greece. Cunningham at sea and Longmore in the air were doing pretty much as they liked. Only the army of the Nile apparently was doing nothing.

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Week after vital week slipped by in November, and still Wavell did not move. People pointed to the Greeks and said, “ They can beat the Italians. Why can’t we do something ? ” November drifted into December, all good campaigning weather in the desert, and I began to hear criticism everywhere in the Middle East. There was a feeling of despondency about the army. One retreat had followed another — Norway, Dunkirk, British Somaliland. People talked of “ Headquarters Muddle East,” and it became the fashion to make jokes about the staff officers in Cairo angling for promotion. And as the Greeks continued through Koritza into Albania newspapers went as far as they could in an effort to say, “ Why doesn’t Wavell attack in the Western Desert now that the Italians are tied up in Greece ? ”

Actually the position in the desert was this. General O’Connor, the corps commander, had placed his old armoured division as a holding force at the front between Mersa Matruh and Sidi Barrani. They had in support an Indian division including some British regiments, nearly a division of New Zealanders, and two divisions of Australians either training or simply waiting in the Delta and Palestine. There were in addition heterogeneous groups like the Poles whom it was not thought desirable to send against the Italians since Italy had never broken off diplomatic relations with Poland. Shipments had lately been arriving of twenty-five-pounder guns, new thirty-ton infantry tanks, and aircraft of various kinds including Hurricanes, Wellingtons and Long-nosed Blenheims.

On the Italian side Graziani had established one Libyan and one Metropolitan division at the front around Sidi Barrani under the com- mand of General Gallina. Reaching inland, south, south-west and west- wards in a great arc from the coast, some half-dozen fortified camps had been established : Maktila, some miles east of Sidi Barrani on the coast ; Tummar East and Tummar West ; Nibeiwa and Point Ninety — all more or less due south of Sidi Barrani ; and finally Sofafi, deep in the desert near the Libyan border. As desert architecture goes, these camps were

E lavish affairs. The general design was a convenient rise perhaps mile or a mile square surrounded with a stone wall. Inside the Italians had established messes, hospitals and sleeping quarters by scoop- ing holes in the sand and rock, putting a stone wall round the holes and surmounting the tops with pieces of camouflaged canvas. Outside the camps they built watching-posts by digging holes in the desert. Minefields were embedded on the eastern, northern and southern approaches. Rough, incredibly dusty tracks linked one camp with another. Sidi Barrani had in addition to its ring of outlying camps two lines of fortifications where they had dug anti-tank traps and furnished niches for machine-guns, anti-tank guns and artillery. In command of the camps immediately adjacent to the central fortress of Sidi Barrani was General Maletti, a veteran of the Abyssinian campaign. He had

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been given what I suppose was an Italian Panzer Division. It had a special name— the Raggruppamento Maletti, or the Raggruppamento Oasi Meridionali — and there is some evidence that when the time came for the race across to the Nile, Maletti and his shock troopers were to be in the van. But for the time being he and Gallina were resting, digging in, building up supplies and waiting for their great new road, the Via della Vittoria, linking Solium with Sidi Barrani, to be completed.

Back on the escarpment in reserve were two more divisions under General Bergonzoli— the famed Electric Whiskers— and General Berti. These had been acting as garrison troops to Corps Headquarters at Bardia and holding ^ the escarpment. Still another division — General Giuseppe Amico’s “ Catanzaro ” division— was designed to act as a relief at the front. There were then some six Italian divisions — perhaps a hundred thousand men in all — available to Graziani for use as attacking troops. Facing him between Sidi Barrani and the Nile there were some four British divisions or not more than sixty thousand men. In guns of all classes, in all kinds of transport and tanks except heavy tanks, Graziani s forces enjoyed a numerical superiority of probably not less than three to one and in some cases very much more. In the air he certainly had a three to one numerical advantage. Even if his initial assaults failed, he stood — on paper — little chance of a major setback. Strong garrisons of more than a division each were centred at such key points as Tobruk, Derna, Benghazi, in addition to many strong pockets of supporting infantry in desert posts like Mekili south of Derna.

It was generally assumed that in all Libya Graziani disposed of some quarter million troops against Wavell’s hundred thousana based around the Nile and the Suez Canal. It was apparent then that nowhere, not even at sea, did we possess equality in numbers (though both British pilots and sailors had proved in the preceding months that this was by no means necessary for success). In fact, Graziani was sitting pretty — even though he was sitting in the imponderable Western Desert which had once swallowed up a Persian host under Cambyses and brought disaster to many conquerors since then.

The general disposition of his armies was arranged with strong Latin logic. Everything fanned out exactly from a base. From Tripoli, his chief supply port where ships were then unloaded undisturbed by air raids, his lines of communication stretched east to Benghazi and far south into the Libyan desert oasis at Kufra. From Benghazi, his most vital base, the lines fanned out again to Barce, Cirene, Derna and Tobruk in the north on the coast, and in the south below the mountains to the desert fort of Mekili. Then from Tobruk the northern line reached to Bardia and Solium and fanned south to the border desert post at Jarabub. And now he had created his latest fan stretching into Egypt as far as Sidi Barrani ; thence describing an arc down to Sofafi. Every section hinged on pivot, and the pivots were Bardia, Tobruk, Benghazi, Tripoli. Each

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sector fitted into the one behind it, so that the successive termini of each of the northern arms of each pivot were Sidi Barrani, Bardia, Tobruk and Benghazi. And the southern termini were the chain of desert posts, Sorafi, Jarabub, Mekili and Kufra. Doubtless other fans were planned from Sidi Barrani and Mersa Matruh until the Nile Delta was reached.

The obvious point in this grand strategy was that while you had to mass your main forces on the coast where the good roads and the ships and airfields were, yet you still had to guard your desert flank against sudden encircling inland raids. In the end it was Graziani’s failure to

1.1 *s Prjnc*P^c or realize just how far and fast an encircling raid could go that brought him to utter ruin. It was Wavell’s and O Connor s strength that from the first moment they never relaxed these encircling movements or their pressure on the desert flank. And always governing every engagement from a siege or a pitched battle down to a skirmish were the opposite theories of the two commanders : Wavell with his policy of light fast mobile forces ; Graziani with his theory of defensive positions. Wavell stabbed with a lance. Graziani presented a shield.

The story of the Benghazi advance begins far back in November 194°- The Italians as was their custom, had not been patrolling except for occasional heavily armed parties which in a great cloud of dust toured the forward area. Our patrolling was done in small groups, sometimes a single vehicle, and nearly always at night. A lieutenant and a dozen men would drive far out into no-man s-land in the darkness, camouflage their vehicles with nets and salt-bush before dawn, and lie motionless on the floor of the desert throughout the day. More often than not, aircraft would fail to spot them, but at the first sign of superior land forces on the desert horizon they would try to identify the enemy and then quickly escape back to our lines. Thus a considerable amount of information was always coming into British Corps Headquarters. O’Connor was well aware that these fortified camps, like Nibeiwa and the two Tummars, were being built, but he did not know how many were completed or exactly where and what further forts were projected. He tried one frontal tank attack on Nibeiwa, and when some of our tanks came to grief on the Italian minefields and were met by considerable artillery fire it became obvious that these forts were of some strength. Each was reckoned to have about three thousand men with a very high rate of fire power.

But a British Intelligence colonel began to notice among the reports which the patrols were constantly bringing in that those scouts who penetrated the area between Nibeiwa and Sofafi invariably returned with no news at all. No contact was made with the enemy. Puzzled, he went out himself, just he and a driver, and lay in the desert south of Nibeiwa getting the same result. He returned on the succeeding night. And then again and again, each time going a little deeper into enemy territory.

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Still he struck nothing. Could it be possible that there was a gap — a considerable gap — between Sofafi and Nibeiwa which the Italians had not yet fortified nor were even patrolling ? It was improbable that they would blunder like this. But there it was — over this whole area as large as the home counties in England no opposition was to be found. It was reasonable to assume that the Italians had not fortified on the inward western side of their chain of camps. After all, their own supply columns had to reach each camp from the west, so the supposition was that their minefields and anti-tank traps were concentrated on the outward eastern side. Moreover it followed that their artillery would be facing toward the British. Suppose then that this weak point, this gap between the forts, really existed ? Suppose the British were to rush this gap and then, wheeling north, attack the camps one by one from the unfortified inward side ? Might not then the whole Italian front be like an egg with a rotten inside ? It was not impossible that we might penetrate as far as Sidi Barrani and even reach the coast behind the village to cut it off from its lifeline to Solium. Given that, what then ? Sidi Barrani could be besieged by land, sea and air. The British could push down the coast to Solium, isolating the garrison of Sofafi to the south and forcing its members to retire up the escarpment on to Bardia.

Everything would depend on surprise. The Navy as well as the Air Force would have to be called in. Even so in November these con- jectures appeared visionary and super-optimistic, so strongly were the Italians entrenched, so few were the forces Wavell had to bring against them. But the scheme was one which would have appealed to every man in the desert. O’Connor came back to Cairo and put it up to Wavell— Wavell who was very ready indeed to listen. The generals had one good card — the new infantry tanks had arrived, the famous “ I ” tank. Their surprise effect would be redoubled in an important engage- ment. Wavell sounded out the other two services. Cunningham, rein- forced from home, was agreeable. He would send some of his heaviest units ahead of the army to bombard first the outlying coastal camp Maktila, then Sidi Barrani itself, then, if need be, he would get to work on Solium too. Longmore was less strong, but he had been reinforced also. His pilots had lately been showing a very definite superiority against the large bodies of Italian aircraft which used to come over Mersa Matruh. He also was agreeable. At home Churchill gave support. There were strong political reasons for attempting an offensive. England had endured the worst of the autumn air raids, but now the long nights had set in and Nazi raiders were expanding their damage again at little cost to themselves. Sinkings in the Atlantic were growing. Apart from the repulse of the Italians in Greece there was nowhere the public could turn for some sign of hope and encouragement.

A campaign in the Western Desert was the soundest possible way to remind the people of Britain that they were not alone, that they had

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outside forces fighting for them and toward them through Africa and Europe. Churchill was more than approving. He was enthusiastic. It remained now solely to choose a date and somehow keep the thing secret. That was the problem. To keep it secret in a land where gossip runs wild ; where enemy agents were known to lurk in every port from Alexandria to Haifa and Aden, where so many half-allies were expecting to be “ kept informed,” where such arrangements as the unloading and movement of ships were plain for anyone to watch. How to get at least two divisions and artillery up to the front in the open desert without the enemy reconnaissance planes seeing them ? How to get ships out of Alexandria and up the coast unobserved ? How to get extra foodstuffs, extra transport, medical supplies and ambulances forward without Cairo buzzing with the news that “ something was going to come off soon ” ? How indeed to confine the information to a few key men at G.H.Q. that was strewn over Cairo and Alexandria and split into separate commands for the three services ?

Wavell himself was a past master at saying nothing and appearing and acting in exactly the same way before a tea-party or a major offensive. But he was an island in a sea of garrulousness. It was as essential to keep the secret from our troops as from our enemy. There was one simple device — keep the desert and Cairo apart from one another. Communica- tions between the desert and Cairo, as every war correspondent knew only too well, were terrible. Now while the preparations were being made in the desert no troops were allowed back on leave to the Delta where they might inadvertently spread hints and suggestions. Tickets of leave were choked off, not suddenly but gradually, so no suspicion was aroused. Another thing helped Wavell. He had delayed so long now that the public and the services — and presumably the enemy — had given up guessing when he might attack, or had even abandoned hope of it altogether. The flying fields were isolated in the desert and that again helped. Further to confuse the troops in the field, as well as to give them some training and to perplex the enemy, many units were ordered out on manoeuvres long before the actual attack and then with- drawn again. In G.H.Q. Wavell selected half a dozen men who had to have the exact information in advance. He swore them to silence : he ordered them to turn aside awkward enquiries among their junior officers.

But by far the most valuable aid in this campaign of secrecy was the misjudgment of the enemy. All the Fascists knew of the British Army at this time was that it had retreated before the Germans in Belgium, Norway and France, and before the Italians in British Somali- land and the Western Desert. To the Italians in December 1940 it was inconceivable that the British could really seriously attack. They were on the defensive and had been all along. Moreover there was an interior rottenness in the Italian Intelligence, something that grew naturally out of the national weakness for exaggeration. There is, as anyone who has

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lived in Italy will know, nothing especially unethical in this desire to enlarge and aggrandize and embroider. Nearly every Italian I have met has a passion and a talent for bombast and display. He just can’t help himself. It is a foible that has led many people into the error of believing the Italian is stupid, which he certainly is not. He proceeds with cold unsentimental logic in his inner reasoning, and makes allowances for the colourful descriptions of his friends and indeed for his own embroideries. He expects exaggerations in himself and everyone else. Nor has this in any way diminished the Italian genius for design and logic. Exaggeration never, as far as I could see, deterred the Italian from reaching decisions as well as anyone else in peace-time. But in war everything is different. Information becomes a commodity in itself. It has to be as exact as the corner-stone of a building or the barrel of a gun. And you could not overnight cure the individualistic Italian lieutenant and captain of his boastfulness. Indeed the war had spurred officers and politicians on to still greater efforts in exaggeration. The Italian communiques were absurd. Again and again some hit-and-run Italian pilot woula return to his Libyan base with stories of how he had shot down ten . . . fifteen . . . twenty aircraft, or destroyed two, three or more battleships. The Roman newspapers outdid the communiques that faithfully repeated these fables. When Graziani destroyed a dozen vehicles he claimed two thousand. Without doubt the Italian High Command, knowing that the cynical public would discount something, always added a few more imaginary and lurid details to every pronouncement. Anyway, they might have argued, we are a mercurial, imaginative people, and one solid victory will prove all our earlier claims correct. Yet the net effect was that the Italian people (I saw this before the war) lived in a state of cynical, distrustful confusion about the news. They were never quite able to say that Mussolini was wrong, since he kept serving them victories and allowed no information in from outside ; but still the doubt was there. Furthermore there was the natural desire for victories ; the wish that the news would be good. More than anyone the Italian wanted to believe what he was tola was right.

And indeed until now the Duce had been able to give him successes. But the dangerous thing was that right through the Italian Army down to the rawest ranks a stream of wrong information was flowing. If a few shots were exchanged, the Italian private called it a skirmish and quite groundlessly claimed he had killed and routed the enemy. If a lieutenant was sent out on a raid, he expanded it in his reports to an engagement. An engagement became a major action or even a battle. From company headquarters to battalion, to brigade, to division, a supply of inaccurate details kept arriving at Italian G.H.Q. Even if G.H.Q. discounted what they heard by half, they were still left in the dark, not knowing where to draw the line between truth and fiction.

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So Wavell in that first week of December might reasonably have expected some measure of surprise. His plan was simple in arrangement, simple in detail but somewhat complex at the edges. He could not possibly know how far or how fast he would go — if he went at all. So he planned his offensive first as a major raid. If the raid went well, then his troops would be so disposed that they could pursue the enemy even as far as Solium, if need be, or beyond — though nobody quite hoped for that. If he got into difficulties, he could again withdraw back on Mersa Matruh. The Air Force, first, then the Navy, would start the action. For forty-eight hours Air Commodore Collishaw, the R.A.F. commander in the desert, would send over almost continuous raids on to the airfields of Libya — high-level and dive-bombing and ground strafing. The object here was to keep the Italian air force on the ground until the British troops took up position and accomplished at least the first leg of their advance. The Navy meanwhile would make a dawn shelling of Maktila, the most forward Fascist post on the coastal road, and if the fort was reduced, would continue to Sidi Barrani, where the fifteen-inch naval guns were to demolish whatever they could find there. While this was going on the army would move up.

Two divisions were to be employed — the 7th armoured division under Major-General O’More Creagh and the 4th Indian division under Major-General Beresford-Pierce. The more experienced and more mobile armoured division would form the spearhead of the assault. Having gone through the gap, that unexplained but undeniable gap between Nibeiwa and Sofafi, Creagh would wheel northward sharply and attack one by one with the all-important infantry tanks the Italian camps at Nibeiwa, Tummar West, Tummar East and Point Ninety. He would also endeavour to reach the coast in the neighbourhood of Buq Buq between Solium and Sidi Barrani, and hold a position there, thus outflanking the Sofafi garrison and cutting the retreat of the Italians, if any, from Sidi Barrani. Other units would also be sent direcdy upon Sofafi. Creagh’s position might be a very awkward one indeed if he were not supported. Accordingly the Indian division would also plunge through the gap in close support and carry out the mopping-up opera- tions upon Nibeiwa, the two Tummars and Point Ninety. This would bring them to the southern approaches of Sidi Barrani which they were to attack if still able to do so. On the coast units of the British garrison at Mersa Matruh were to emerge from their entrenchments and engage Maktila fortress which by then, it was hoped, would have been much reduced by the Navy. On the fall of Maktila the Mersa Matruh force would proceed straight toward Sidi Barrani and attack it from the east while the other two divisions were attacking from the south. Sappers would go ahead of our forces tearing up our own mines and dealing as far as they could with the Italian traps.

The weak point in the whole scheme was that somehow the armoured

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and the Indian divisions had to be got into position for attack without the Italians knowing it. There was no complete answer to this problem. The only course was to go ahead and see what happened. This is what happened.

On the night of December 7th when the desert air was already icy with the coming winter, the two British divisions made a forced march of seventy miles through the darkness up to points a few miles back from the Itahan lines where they could still not be observed from ground level. All through the day of December 8th the thousands of men in full kit lay dispersed and inert on the flat desert. Luck held. An Italian recon- naissance plane came over, but apparently neither saw nor suspected anything. No Italian patrol came out far enough to discover what was afoot. The air was busy with Collishaw’s planes passing back and forth to the Libyan airfields and they were having a wonderful time. The score of enemy aircraft damaged on the ground or caught aloft mounted from ten to twenty to the fifties. Everywhere, at Gazala, Bomba, El Adem, Tobruk, Benina and beyond, the Italian air force was being pinned to the ground. Through the night of the 8th, while still the two divisions lay pressed to the desert waiting for the morning, the Royal Navy stole on Maktila in readiness for its bombardment at first light.

In Cairo at 9 a.m. on the 9th General Wavell summoned the war correspondents to his office. We were a small group of seven or eight and as we filed into the General’s room and sat in a semicircle around him he got up from his chair and stood before us, leaning back on his desk. He was in his shirt sleeves. His desk was tidy ; his ten-foot wall maps non-committal. He wore no glass in his blind eye and for the first time in my knowledge of him he was smiling slightly. Quietly and easily and without emphasis he said :

“ Gentlemen, I have asked you to come here this morning to let you know that we have attacked in the Western Desert. This is not an offensive and I do not think you ought to describe it as an offensive as yet. You might call it an important raid. The attack was made early this morning and I had word an hour ago that the first of the Italian camps has fallen. I cannot tell you at this moment how far we are going to go — it depends on what supplies and provisions we capture and what petrol we are able to find. I wanted to tell you this so that you can make your own arrangements.” I asked if the weather was favour- able. The General answered yes. He questioned us then to discover if any of us knew that the attack had been planned. It was important, he said, since, if the correspondents had not known, then, presumably, no one else except the authorized few had known. Not one of us was able to say he had had any hint of it. The surprise was complete.

There was a scatter then to get to the front — a full day and a half’s journey away. And there began for us, on that brilliant winter morning, 3

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such a chain of broken communications and misunderstandings and mis- takes that no correspondent who took part in the campaign is ever likely to forget. The press arrangements for correspondents in peace-time had been sketchy. In the face of a British victory they broke down almost entirely, though later conditions were greatly improved. It was days before we reached the front. For ever the forward troops vanished ahead of us as we sat stranded in our broken vehicles. Messages went astray for days or were lost altogether. We scraped what food we could from the desert or went without. We hitch-hiked when our vehicles broke down. Often we abandoned sleep in order to catch up. None of this, of course, was comparable to the difficulties the soldier in the line was putting up with. But it was a new kind of reporting : exasperating, exciting, fast-moving, vivid, immense and slightly dangerous. And what we had to say had such interest at that time that our stale descrip- tions were published fully when at last they did arrive in London and New York. It was a job that was for ever a little beyond one’s reach. But I personally emerged from it two months later very glad to have been there and much wiser than when I went in.

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We have taken twenty thousand prisoners with tanks, guns and equipment of all types. — Cairo communique, December 12th, 1940.

The Italian crust had been cracked already while Wavell was speaking to us. In the first sickly grey light of the morning a small frontal attack had been sent upon Nibeiwa, and it blinded Maletti to the far greater danger that was threatening him from behind. Bising up from their hidden positions, British forces began to pour through the gap with new infantry tanks in the van. These fell on Nibeiwa from the rear, while Maletti’s men, rushing from their beds, were still engaged with the smaller frontal attack. Italian guns were swung upon the infantry tanks, but the tanks, carrying heavier armour than any seen before in the desert, swept on through the barrage. By now British shells were falling squarely on Nibeiwa itself, combing through the clustered stone huts, the parked lorries, the gun emplacements embedded in the surrounding wall. Maletti, a stoutish bearded man, was wounded even as he attempted to call his men to counter-attack. He retired into his tent with a machine-gun and was firing from his bedside when at last he was killed. It was all over in half an hour. The camp’s thirty tanks had not even been properly manned. Everything the Italians had built through

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three hard months collapsed in bewilderment and chaos in that quiet morning hour when they would normally have been going about the first routine duties of the day.

Following in the wake of the army while it was hammering in the same way and at the same speed on Tummar West and Tummar East, we came on strange pathetic scenes at Nibeiwa. A cluster of broken burnt- out lorries and Bren-gun carriers proclaimed from a distance where the first British attack had fouled a minefield. Coming nearer, we found all the approaches pitted with small square holes let into the surface of the desert, and surrounding these empty cartridge cases and overturned machine-guns — the last remaining evidence of how the Italian outposts, straining their eyes through the darkness, had fired upon the approaching enemy and fled. Here and there trucks which had been carrying supplies and reliefs up to these outposts lay smashed by artillery fire beside the tracks, or were simply abandoned by the passengers who had fled back afoot to the temporary safety of the fort. Minefields were still strewn over large areas of the desert.

Cutting south and west to avoid these, and clinging closely to the tracks the heavy infantry tanks had made, we came at last into Nibeiwa itself. Here and there before the breaches in the walls a dead man lay spread-eagled on the ground, or collapsed grotesquely at the entrance of his dugout under a gathering cloud of flies. Some sixty or seventy mules and donkeys, recovered now from their shock at the noise of battle, nosed mournfully and hopelessly among the debris in search of fodder and water. Finding none, they would lift their heads and bray pathetic- ally into the heavy dust-laden air. Italian light tanks were grouped at the spot on the western wall where they had huddled for a last stand and there surrendered. Others had bolted inside the fort itself and were turned this way and that, indicating how they had sought at the last moment for some formation to meet the attack. Maletti’s body covered with a beribboned tunic still lay sprawled on the threshold of his tent, his beard stained with sand and sweat.

Sand was blowing now out of the immense ruts cut up by the tanks, and, walking through it, we went from one tent to another, from one dugout by subterranean passage into the next. Extraordinary things met us wherever we turned. Officers’ beds laid out with clean sheets, chests of drawers filled with linen and abundance of fine clothing of every kind. Uniforms heavy with gold lace and decked with the medals and colours of the parade ground hung upon hangers in company with polished jack- boots richly spurred and pale blue sashes and belts finished with great tassels and feathered and embroidered hats and caps. An Indian came running to us through the camp with one of those silver and gilt belts — a gaudy shining thing that the Fascists sling around their shoulders on parade. We came on great blue cavalry cloaks that swathed a man to the ankles, and dressing-tables in the officers’ tents were strewn with

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scents and silver-mounted brushes and small arms made delicately in the romantic northern arsenals of Italy.

We sat down on the open sand and ate from stores of bottled cherries and greengages ; great tins of frozen hams and anchovies ; bread that had been baked somehow here in the desert ; and wines from Frascati and Falerno and Chianti, red and white, and Lacrimae Christi from the slopes of Vesuvius above Naples. There were wooden casks of a sweet, heady, fruity brandy, and jars of liqueurs of other kinds wrapped carefully in envelopes of straw. For water the Italians took bottles of Recoaro minerals— the very best in Italy— and these, like everything else, had been carted out to them in hundreds of cases across a thousand miles of sea and desert by ship and car and mule team.

The spaghetti was packed in long blue paper packages and stored with great sacks of macaroni and other wheat foods as numerous as they used tq be in the shops of Italy before the war. Parmesan cheeses as big as small cart-wheels and nearly a foot thick lay about in neat piles except where some hungry soldier had slashed one open with his sword. Ten- pound tins of Estratto di Pomidoro — the tomato extract vital to so many Italian dishes— formed the bulk of the tinned stuff, which also contained many excellent stews and delicate tinned tongue and tunny fish and small round tins of beef. The vegetables were of every kind. Potatoes, onions, carrots, beans, cabbages, leeks, cauliflowers, pumpkin and many other things had been steamed down into a dry compact that readily expanded to its old volume when soaked in warm water — a fine food for the desert. We sampled one package that seemed at first to contain drY grass> but brewed itself over a stove into a rich minestrone soup.

I stepped down into at least thirty dugouts, coming upon something new and surprising in every one. The webbing and leather work was of the finest ; the uniforms well cut and of solid material such as the civilian in Italy had not seen for many months. Each soldier appeared to have been supplied with such gadgets as sewing-bags and httle leather cases for his letters and personal kit. The water containers were of new improved design— both the aluminium tanks that strap on the shoulders and those that one fastened to the flanks of a mule or stowed in a lorry. And over everything, wherever I went, fell a deepening layer of sand. For two days now it had been blowing, and before one’s eyes one saw stores of clothing, piles of food, rifles, boxes of ammunition, the carcasses of animals and the bodies of men fast disappearing under the surface of the desert. All this richness and its wreckage, all the scars of the battle and all the effort of ten thousand men, it seemed, would not prevail longer than a week or two, and soon Nibeiwa would be restored to the feature- lessness and monotony of the surrounding waste.

Moving round in the sand, one stumbled on cartridge clips, rifles, machine-guns, swords and hand-grenades that had been flung aside, especially at the entrance to dugouts, in scores of thousands. These

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hand-grenades came to be known as money boxes or shaving sticks or pillar boxes. They were tiny things that fitted easily into the palm of your hand. They had a black cylindrical base, a rounded top coloured vivid red, and one pulled a small leather flap to explode them. I must have seen ten thousand that morning.

I went into the tented hospitals where the British and Italian sick were still lying tended by British and Italian doctors. These hospitals were large square khaki-coloured tents of a good height for the coolness and fitted with ample mica windows. The stores of bandages, splints, lini- ments, drugs, surgical instruments and folding beds would have served this or any other comparable army ten times over. Here as everywhere there was precision and immense planning with immense quantity of materials. I sat in an operating theatre and drank wine with a soldier who had fought over the places I knew in the Spanish war. He pressed more food upon me and cases of wine — indeed it was he, the vanquished, who had everything to give and we who were tired and hungry. And somehow out of relief and boredom he had achieved a sense of fatality that had given him peace of mind. He was accepting the prospect of imprisonment much as a schoolboy will accept his lessons as painful but inevitable. Yet the Italian minded the absence of his family and his friends perhaps more than we did.

Never did an army write home or receive letters as this one did. For five miles the landscape was strewn with their letters. In the offices of adjutants I came on bureaux stacked with thousands of official post cards which expressed the usual greetings and to which a soldier had only to attach his name and an address. But most preferred to write their own letters in a thin spidery schoolboy scrawl full of homely Latin flourishes ; full of warm superlatives like “ carissimo ” . . . “ benissimo.” The theme for ever ran on children and religion. No post card ever closed without some reference to the day when the family or the lovers would be reunited. They were not the sort of letters British troops would have written. But underneath the (to us) flamboyant emotionalism they were, I suppose, the same.

I read : “ God watch and keep our beloved Frederico and Maria and may the blessed Virgin preserve them from all harm until the short time, my dearest, passes when I shall press thee into my arms again. I cry. I weep for thee here in the desert at night and lament our cruel separation. But in the day I am filled with courage as our glorious campaign sweeps on from one more magnificent victory to another. . . .” The shabby, dirty and not very courageous little soldier explaining away the dirt and the shabbiness to himself with great sounding adjectives, and reaching out to high thoughts and his God to comfort him. He got his comfort, too. He had to. The Italian would not and could not accept the desert and the hardship of this unwanted war. He had little heart for it and still less training. He could only think, “ This is an evil time that must

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pass quickly.” So he turned to his family and his church with an emotion- alism which was pathetic, even absurd, but very sincere. He wrote, too, a stilted literary style, using long Latin words in the same surprising way as the Spanish peasant. Often he put down his message on the back of a highly coloured post card of extraordinary vulgarity.

Yet it was only really the correspondence of the more sycophantic officers that turned out to be amusing. The men usually did not believe in the war or care much how it went so long as they personally did not get hurt : the officers as a rule were astonishingly Fascist. Their letters, betraying the monotony of their life, would often contain a string of perfunctory entries like : English bomber passed over us this morning but did not see us ... Tenente Recagno "has received his promo- tion . . . “ Nothing of importance to-day.” But suddenly they would burst out with : But for the cowardice of the English, who flee from even our lightest shelling and smallest patrols, we would have T committed the wildest folly in coming into this appalling desert. The flies plague us in millions from the first hour of the morning. The sand seems always to be in our mouths, in our hair and our clothes, and it is impossible to get cool. Only troops of the highest morale and courage would endure privations like these, and even prepare to press the advance to still greater triumphs in the cause of Fascism and the Duce. The colonel at dinner last night made a brilliant exposition of our prospects, toasting in the name of the Duce the defeat and annihilation of the English armies. We shall soon be at Alexandria. We shall soon now be exchanging this hellish desert for the gardens on the Nile. As I came out of the mess into the starlight last night I found my breast stirred and thrilled with a transcendent emotion, as though I could feel the fife blood of the new Italy coursing through my heart, urging me on to still greater courage and greater achievements.”

I read one letter which contained a piece of doggerel that, roughly translated, runs like this :

“ Long live the Duce and the King.

The British will pay for everything.

On land and sea and in the air They’ll compensate us everywhere.”

But there^was much hard common sense besides. One letter-writer insisted : “ We are trying to fight this war as though it is a colonial war in Africa. But it is a European war in Africa fought with European weapons against a European enemy. We take too little account of this in building our stone forts and equipping ourselves with such luxury.

We are not fighting the Abyssinians now.”

There was the whole thing ; the explanation of this broken, savaged camp. Maletti’s panzer division was as tame as an old lion in the zoo. Undoubtedly they had courage, some of them. But they were living on

MEDITERRANEAN FRONT 7 1

a preposterous scale. The British coming into the camp could scarcely believe their eyes when they saw that each man had his own little “ espresso ” coffee percolator with which he brewed his special cup after meals. The British brigadiers in this action had not for many weeks or even months lived as the Italian non-commissioned officer was living. In the British lines there were no sheets, no para.de-ground uniforms, and certainly no scent. The brigadier dressed in khaki shorts and shirt. He got bacon for breakfast, bully stew and tinned fruit for lunch, and the same again at night. His luxuries were the radio, cigarettes and whisky with warm water. But wine, liqueurs, cold ham, fresh bread— no, seldom if ever that.

Even the Italian trucks, of which there were several hundred scattered about Nibeiwa and the other camps, carried all kinds of equipment never seen in the British lines. The field telephones, wireless, typewriters and signalling gear were far more elaborate than anything we had used. Booty, in fact, worth several millions of pounds lay here if it could only be reclaimed in time. (It wasn’t.)

Sappers were at work, getting vital parts off the Italian machines so that they could keep their own vehicles on the road. We ourselves, already short of transport, endeavoured to take over one of the great green ten-ton Lancia trucks standing about. But though we inspected dozens, all had either been wrecked at the last moment by the Italians or were hit or had gear too complicated for us to start. Later many hundreds of these vehicles, together with Fiats and the S.P.A. brand, were on the road carrying British troops and supplies to the front. Indeed, as W^ avell had indicated, the advance could not have gone forward without them. In guns, too, we had at Nibeiwa a foretaste of the prizes ahead. Many were of old stock and small calibre like the Breda, but ammunition lay about in great abundance.

Of the thirty-odd Italian tanks some half were fit for service and some were already being dragged off to workshops when I arrived. But the light Italian tank and the hghter flame-thrower were failures, and men asked for death in riding behind their thin armour. Curiously, in all essential things — guns, tanks, lorries, ammunition — the Italian equip- ment was not good. And vast numbers did not make up for the de- ficiency. The ten-ton Lancias ran on diesel — as did most of the Italian vehicles — but they had solid tyres which shook the vehicles to pieces after a short time among the boulders on the desert. Moreover, when a ten-ton lorry which was also a good target broke down, ten tons of supplies were held up. We preferred to run on petrol, using five-tonners or hghter machines. If one broke down, then no more than five tons were delayed, and repacking on to a sound vehicle was easier. Never- theless, from this moment on, more and more captured Italian equipment was pressed into service against the Italians.

Nibeiwa was our first storehouse. As I drove away from it north-

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ward in the early afternoon the blown sand cleared for a moment reveal- ing two big desert birds that circled and twisted some twenty feet above the ground until, seeing what they wanted, they dived and settled amid the stench where an Italian mule team had gone down to death with its crew under British machine-gun fire.

Northward, toward the coast beyond Nibeiwa, things had gone with a precision and speed that outstripped all communications. After Nibeiwa, according to the plan, one section of the armoured division had branched off on the lonely desert route in the direction of Sofafi ; another had struck for the coast between Buq Buq and Sidi Barrani ; and the other had made straight toward Sidi Barrani, mopping up forts as it went. This last northerly column was the one I was following.

ummar West and Tummar East had gone that same first day almost as quickly as Nibeiwa. Nothing, it seemed, could withstand the new infantry tanks. Travelling only twelve miles an hour, they lunged out of the dust of the battle and were on the Italians or behind them before anything could be done. The Italians in despair saw that their light anti-tank shells just rattled off the tanks’ turrets, and even light artillery was not effective against them. The whole of this advance, then, was done with this surprise weapon — surprise, not because the enemy did not know about it, but because they did not know it was in Egypt and they had nothing to bring against it.

Maktila on the coast had been heavily plastered by the Navy, and by the time the British garrison from Mersa Matruh came to attack they found many of the enemy already fled. These fugitives turned back to strengthen Point Ninety, the two Tummars and Sidi Barrani itself. But the infantry tanks rode upon them with artillery in support, and by the time I reached the battlefield all Italian forces who had managed to get away had retired into Sidi Barrani and were already attempting to escape farther down the coast road in the direction of Solium. In ^Pl*rtm§ ^usC we drove past the Tummars, a richer arsenal yet than Nibeiwa. For miles on either side of the track the undulating surface of the desert was honeycombed with ammunition dumps, each dump about ten feet by eight by two feet high and spaced a hundred yards apart. These were the shells Graziani had stored against the day when he was to have advanced on the Nile. Every rise was dotted with stationary and abandoned Italian trucks and vehicles of all kinds. Notepaper flew forlornly across the battlefield in every direction, and here and there a gun stuck in the dust in a ring of empty shell cases.

A bitter artillery duel had been fought out with the Italian guns on a height near the coast. And now on the morning of the third day the British flung themselves on the defences of Sidi Barrani itself. Unwilling to delay their advantage until more artillery caught up with them, the tanks and infantry went in together against the first line. This was a series of zigzag trenches on a rise buttressed from other positions among

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the sand-dunes. As the fine sand whirled up in monstrous yellow clouds, visibility shut down first from a hundred, then to fifty yards. The battle locked in choking heat over two miles of rocky desert. Constantly in the sand-dunes the Italians kept up enfilading fire upon the central British thrust. But by ii a.m. at the bayonet point we had gained the first ridge and Sidi Barrani lay in view. The tanks then felt their way around east and west of the Italians, and suddenly in the early afternoon appeared right amongst them. Artillery posts were charged direct. Everywhere in the yellow light of the dust storm men were running, shouting, firing, diving for shelter. A regiment of Scots charged from the ridge they had gained earlier in the day, and though their best N.C.O.’s went down, the rest came on. Groups of Italians began bobbing up from their trenches, waving white handkerchiefs, towels, shirts, and shouting, “ Ci rendiamo ” (We surrender).

The tanks now were upon Sidi Barrani itself and the infantry came pell-mell after them. General Gallina was there with his staff. They knew it was useless. Their surrender was received while still the ragged edges of the battle were sounding with rifle and mortar fire. This was about 3 p.m. Toward evening the Mersa Matruh troops, having pushed all opposition on the coast out of their way, entered the town from the east. Gallina drew the remnants of his army together and, addressing them quietly, an elderly general with a general’s sweeping grey beard, he said, “ You have fought bravely.” They took him and his officers off to captivity by aeroplane.

Tne British now found themselves in a place of utter desolation. Sidi Barrani, so the Italians had been broadcasting, had been a thriving city, its trams running, its shops open, its beaches thronged. Even its night clubs were said by Rome to be flourishing — a picturesque way of saying that two small brothels of unexampled dreariness were open and doing business. One of the women had been killed and a grave was made for her on the battlefield. In actual fact, Sidi Barrani’s twenty meagre houses had never required a tramway and certainly never had one, and the only shop I ever saw there was the village store with a bomb through the middle of it. Nevertheless there did exist one or two substantial white stone buildings on the seafront. But now all was in ruins. At the climax of many heavy aerial bombardments the Navy had come and flung round after round of fifteen-inch shells upon the village. No house maintained its roof ; none had its walls intact. Everything within was a mass of whitish grey rubble. Shell holes pitted the scrawny streets and twisted the barbed wire round the port. A shell seemed to have blasted each window in such a manner as to leave every wall with an aperture like a huge keyhole driven through it. Wrecked vehicles lay about, and a great quantity of petrol and crude oil drums — some of which, being hit, were burning yet and staining the sand a grimy stinking black. On the out- skirts there were many guns — Bredas, eighteen-pounders and anti-tank

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weapons. Some of these, by a new Italian device, were mounted upon turntables which in turn had been set upon lorries with the object of givmg them the mobility of Ordinary desert transport. Together with the booty at Nibeiwa and the other camps I counted over fifty captured tanks, over five hundred captured vehicles.

The troops who had swept through from the east had found the same eloquent story of surprise-half-eaten breakfasts (served with silver pepper and salt stands china plates and cups) ; clothes half bundled into boxes and then abandoned. And there was the same business of bedside lights book-racks, tents emblazoned with flags, officers’ cloaks thick with decorations, quantities of freshly baked loaves, cases of chocolate, sweet- meats, coffee, jam, cigarettes, tobacco both Italian and English.

Down by the Sidi Barrani sea-cliffs an important base hospital had been established under canvas. The Italian staff in the hospital had vanished leaving an appendicitis patient cut open upon the oper- foundtaWe lnstruments were still sticking in the body when it was

Exhausted by hard travel and sightseeing, we camped down by the hospital for the night. Savoia bombers came over and we did not wake.

starting fresh m the morning, we came at once on to the Via della Vittoria, the new Italian road that ran straight and true to the Libyan border, over those sixty painful miles that once were strewn with deep dust and boulders. At the point where it met the British road at Sidi Barrani the Italians had erected a six-foot cement monument decorated with the fasces and carrying an inscription that declared “ despite wind and sand and the wiles of the enemy ” Egypt and Libya were inseparably joined together under Fascist rule. And indeed the Italian engineers deserved praise. All through the late summer and autumn they had slaved with labour gangs at that road, and now the track was heavily metalled and waiting only for a covering of light metal and bitumen. It was banked and graded with the precision of an auto strada, and of a good width ami flanked by deep ditches for the draining. Here and there cu verts led off to side tracks and offered an opportunity for the heavier vehicles to turn. Steam-rollers which had come from Italy to put the lmshing touches lay along the highway, and as we progressed we found more monuments that proclaimed how such and such a unit had finished a section in record time. On one crest rose a stone bust of Mussolini bearing a quotation from one of his Genoa speeches, “ He who does not eep moving is lost. British soldiers ahead of us who had no taste for irony had bowled the head over into the sand.

Now only ten miles west of Sidi Barrani we saw signs that Creagh’s dash to the coast to cut the retreat of the Italians had succeeded. Italian lorries caught unawares by British tanks lay twisted in smoking ruins on the road Guns stood about dejectedly. All the roadside camps and storage dumps were deserted and bore signs of having been passed over

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by an invading army. Diesel oil drums were tumbled about, spilling their contents on the sand. Every few minutes we had to make a detour to avoid more Italian vehicles left by their drivers astride the road. Food, ammunition and oil dumps followed one another among the sidetracks, all marked with Italian direction posts. Dugout villages roofed with camouflaged waterproof sheets pitted the landscape. The Italians had dug in so completely and comfortably that this was not Egypt any more — it was a part of Italy. They had found and developed a water supply with genius. They had all but completed a pipeline from Bardia. Soon, no doubt, they would have produced market gardens in the desert. At Buq Buq, which I remembered as a Bedouin waterhole dug in the sand, there stood now a line of high pumps like those used for filling loco- motives and two large underground storage tanks.

It was approaching Buq Buq that we came suddenly upon a sight that seemed at first too unreal, too wildly improbable to he believed. An entire captured division was marching back into captivity. A great column of dust turned pink by the sunset light behind them rose from the prisoners’ feet as they plodded four abreast in the sand on either side of the metalled track. They came on, first in hundreds, then in thousands, until the stupendous crocodile of marching figures stretched away to either horizon. No one had time to count them — six, possibly seven thousand, all in dusty green uniforms and cloth caps. Outnumbered roughly five hundred to one, a handful of British privates marched along- side the two columns, and one or two Bren-gtin carriers ran along the road in between. The Italians spoke to me quite freely when I called to them, but they were tired and dispirited beyond caring. I found no triumph in the scene — -just the tragedy of hunger, wounds and defeat. These were the men of General Amico’s “ Catanzaro Division,” I discovered.

Soon we pieced the whole story together. Creagh had reached the coast two days before. His tanks and Bren-gun carriers had burst over the last desert rise on to the new road to find themselves confronted with the Catanzaro Division, which was then moving up on normal relief to Sidi Barrani. The Italians were smoking and singing, since none had expected action so far back behind the front. The British joined action at once, and a smart tank and artillery batde was fought out in the salt pans between the road and the sea. When their tanks failed, the be- wildered Italians simply gave themselves up, and here they were upon the Via della Vittoria, marching to Sidi Barrani and away out of the war without having fired a shot.

Thousands more were clustered round the water points at Buq Buq, a more broken collection of men than I had ever seen. Many were Libyans. They sat upon their haunches in disordered groups awaiting turn to draw water from the cisterns and receive an issue of their own cheese and tinned beef which had been gathered from one of the Italian

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food dumps near by. A company of British troops was guarding them —a company that could have been overwhelmed at any moment. But there was no fight in these Italians, and their fear of the waterless desert overmastered any wild idea they may have had for gaining freedom. They were confused, too, and had no inkling of the smallness of the British forces.

In the , morning three Libyans approached the unarmed war corre- spondents camp which we had pitched among the white sand-dunes beside the sea. They were so utterly dejected and miserable no one take their guns away from them, and they sat watching us stolidly and pathetically while we finished breakfast, wanting only to be taken prisoner. We put them in our truck and drove them back to the prisoners depot by the water wells.

Now at last we had caught up with the front. In the far south Sofafi had fallen with rich loot. It was voluntarily abandoned by the Italians before it had been attacked, and its garrison was making up the escarp- ment toward Bardia under R.A.F. bombardment. Other British troops were moving across to cut them off. Others again were pressing on Solium and Halfaya Pass. There was artillery fire along the escarpment at Solium, and once again I saw the cliffs curtained in smoke and aircraft battling in the sky above. Two Caproni fighters lay upended grotesquely beside the road. More and more prisoners were coming in, bringing with them many guns, tanks, vehicles and truck loads of captured docu- ments. These last were fascinating. One of Bergonzoli’s orders of the day, written just before the British attacked, read : “ The emblems of C u ^tlS^ Army t^at trie£l to bar your way are trampled underfoot. The first steps of the march to Alexandria have been covered. Now onward ! Sidi Barrani is the base of departure for more distant and much more important objectives. Then again, how truly, “ Surprise is always the mastery of war.”

Light rain fell. There followed a wind so sharp and piercing that one could not imagine it had ever been hot in the desert. Goose-flesh pock- marked our bare sunburnt arms, our faces felt blue and bloodless, and the sand came up, stinging, icy and cruel, to bite into our bare knees and arms and stun our eyelids until we could bear it no longer and reached for towels or waterproof sheets to bind round our heads. Our food and petrol gave out, and we spent hours each day ranging round the desert in search of abandoned Italian dumps. At night six of us slept huddled in one car for warmth. Edward Kennedy of the Associated Press of America lost his voice. Alexander Clifford of the Daily Mail caught sand- fly fever and jaundice, and we left him one day huddled in blankets in the lee of a sand-dune by the sea. For an hour that night we could not find him as we hunted through the sand-dunes. When at last we made camp together we succeeded in building a fire of brushwood. On it we cooked the one good meal I can remember of this stage of the campaign— a

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spaghetti stew of Italian tomato, Italian bully beef, Italian Parmesan cheese, washed down with Italian mineral water.

Standing on the top of the dunes that night we watched for an hotir the R.A.F. turning one of their full-scale raids on Bardia. Looking across the wide intervening bay in the darkness, we saw it all stage by stage— the first bombs, the answering fire ; the hits, the misses ; the flames as the aircraft came away ; drama as rounded and directional as a motion picture and watched with the detachment of a spectator in the stalls. Parachute flares with their fresh blinding light hung in the sky above the town, while bombs fell at the rate of two a minute in a regular pendulum motion — right, left, right, left. The A. A. fire in reply turned right, left, in search of the unseen raiders ; then, losing contact, broke into crazy patterns over the sky. “ Like a bull fight,” someone said.

“ And Bardia the bull.” Two flaring lights opened high above the town and descended straightly. Two planes gone ; two picadors. Then more swerving light in the sky ; more interplay of light and the counter- thrust of bomb noise against gun noise. Then the great flash as the ammunition dump went up and a slower flame advanced steadily up into the night. The bull. The surviving planes homewarding sounded over our heads. It was finished and we went to bed on the sand.

At last on December 16th — one week after the fighting had begun — Solium fell ; and with Solium, Halfaya Pass, Fort Capuzzo, Sidi Omar, Musaid and a new line of forts several kilometres long which the Italians had built on the lip of the escarpment. Halfaya’s old rocky track had been graded and surfaced, and as one mounted to the top the old familiar view spread out below — the sweep of Solium bay round into Egypt ; the village below and the western cliffs reaching round into Bardia. Breasting the top of the pass into the high Libyan desert, a wind of such sharpness and force swept upon our open truck that the driver momentarily was forced to stop. No one without glasses could travel looking ahead into that sand-laden wind that hit everything raised above the floor of the desert with the force of an aeroplane slipstream. British camps loomed up among the debris of the broken Italian forts.

We returned and entered Solium where already half a dozen British warships and merchant vessels were discharging water and stores for the army. The Italians here had erected a barbed-wire compound to house British prisoners, and now it was full of their own people. In the desert, too, we found a camp exclusively for captured Italian generals, who plodded about dispiritedly in the sand. Upon every wall were scrawled caricatures of Englishmen, jibes at Churchill and Vivas for the Duce. Prisoners in their extremity were offering the equivalent of an English pound for a loaf of bread. Their units were inextricably mixed and con- fused, since in their flight the Italians had broken up, and many small groups had struck out for themselves in that last frantic rush to gain the safety of Bardia.

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Wltjlln a daY or two of Christmas, and since it did not seem possible that the advance could continue at once, we decided to return to Cairo tor a few days rest. But first we set out for one last visit to the front around Bardia. We were too cold and miserable to be much interested, but we felt we should do it. On the way down the Via della Vittona all but one of our trucks broke down. Standing in the tearing wind we drew matches for who should go on. Clifford and I won. We left the others to hitch-hike the best they could back to our base camp and we crept on into Solium. The Italians were lobbing shells into the village and we turned back into a wadi below Halfaya Pass, where we camped under a thorny clump of palms. We smashed a wooden petrol case and lit a fire under the rocks. Someone produced a tin of plum pudding and half a bottle of whisky, and as we ate and drank, the Italian flying circus came over. This was a flight of about twenty Savoias protected from above by a similar number of fighters. They bombed haphazardly up and down the escarpment just above our heads, and in the night they came again, their flaming exhausts making weird flashes above us as we crouched in that frozen wadi. Clifford had not eaten for

tumedblck Ceaf y WC C°Uld n0t g° °n‘ In the flrst greY light we

So then the first stage was ended. A rough score could be totted up Some thirty thousand prisoners, including five generals, were in our hands. Hundreds of guns, lorries, tanks and aircraft were captured. Equipment worth millions of pounds had been won. The attempted enemy advance to the Nile had been smashed, and the last fighting Italian soldier had been flung out of Egypt. The enemy numbered their dead and wounded m thousands. Our casualties stood at the incredibly good figures of 72 killed and 738 wounded. The Italian egg had been cracked and it was rotten inside. It was largely a victory of the infantry

S7”rceIy one the,se had been lost. Of the six Italian divisions that had been mustered for the capture of Egypt, less than half remained, and these, largely without guns and equipment, were crowded back into Bartim which was even then being surrounded by our armoured forces. More than this, the Italian morale was broken and the prestige of the British Army restored. I went back to Cairo for one of the pleasantest Christmases I can remember. r

General Bergonzoli is still missing. — Cairo communique, January 8th, 1941.

On Christmas morning I drove across the Bulaq Bridge in Cairo to the Church of England cathedral which stands, a pile of very modern yellow brick, beside the Nile a little distance down from the Embassy. After the service a great congregation streamed out into the bright sunshine. Among the brigadiers, the diplomats, the army .nurses, the wives — few of these : most had been evacuated — and the soldiers, General Wavell stood chatting with his friends. People paused as they passed to gaze with open curiosity at this quiet thick-set man whose name now stood higher than that of any soldier in the Empire. He never failed to impress and puzzle slightly everyone who met him, but all the same there was nothing very much to be learned from the first meeting with the General. His voice was high, rather nasal, and unless he was actually engaged upon some definite business he seldom said anything at all. His dark deeply tanned face was lined and heavy to the point of roughness. His thinning hair was grey, and the one good eye left him from the last war gleamed brightly from a face that was usually as expressionless as a statue.

Wavell had just published a book about his old master, called Allenby — a Study in Greatness, and the London Times was reprinting a series of lectures he had delivered a few years before on Generalship. He was essentially a well-bred, well-groomed writer, without humour, without sparkle, and more concerned with getting his subject written than with making it palatable far his audience.

But the book and lectures were valuable in revealing an unsuspected sensitivity and daring. Whatever Wavell was before the last war, he had gained from Allenby a talent for taking responsibility with suppleness and decision and for drawing others after him. In this year in the Middle East he won respect by his silence, and a good deal of admiration through his habit of confidently deputing authority to others. Wilson, O’Connor, Creagh — all of them were bound very strongly to Wavell. One other thing he had, and that was modesty. Now in his fifties, after half a life- time of military training and planning, he had the great fortune to be able to put his ideas to the test. There was nothing very new about them — to use secrecy and surprise to the utmost, to hit hard and quickly and keep following up, to establish strong lines of communication, to be mobile — all sound military practices. But Wavell brought them to life by his own particular ingredient — a touch of daring.

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I recall very clearly each of my meetings with him— more clearly perhaps than I recall meetings with any other public figure. First, there was Wavell standing on the forward deck of a troopship at Suez in ebruary 1940, welcoming the first Australian contingents and saying very clearly and firmly : I am giad to have Australian troops under my command, and I am sure my orders will be fully carried out.” The capitals are the general s. Then, Wavell in blue overalls climbing out of an aircraft in the desert, where he had just made a low reconnaissance of the enemy front line. Wavell walking dourly alone under the trees at a race meeting at Gezira. Wavell sitting in his shirt-sleeves in the war-room at G.H.Q., taking a conference and saying very little or nothing. Wavell in stout whipcord breeches sitting opposite me for three and a half hours on a Sunderland flying-boat journey to Crete. For an hour he fished papers from a pigskin case and made notes upon the margins, reducing those notes to paragraphs and those paragraphs to one-Ene headings. 1 hen for half an hour he browsed quietly through a volume of Brown- ing s love poems, and slept a little and read his verse again. Finally, he chatted with me a little, and when Crete came in sight he was back’ on his notes. It was almost the same on the way home. It was his invariable practice to invite his companion to talk while he asked the questions. Nearly always our short conversations opened with his “ Getting along ail right ? He remembered all our complaints (there were many) and those that did get through to him were settled. The troops liked him. At 'n ?r')rfa’ at.Merj Ajoun in Syria, at Capuzzo in Libya, you

would often find him, just before an important engagement, sitting in a tin hat at an artillery observation post. He encouraged the front-line habit among his generals and liked them