Target Tobruk: Yeoman in the Western Desert Read online

  TARGET TOBRUK

  ROBERT JACKSON

  © Robert Jackson 1980

  First published in 1980 by Corgi.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter One

  The wind came surging up from the south-east, howling like a million devils; the hot, savage desert wind, the khamsin, gathered force steadily as it swept across Libya towards the sea. As it rolled on it scourged the surface of the desert, sucking up the fine dust and forming a great, boiling cloud that stretched from horizon to horizon. Such was the power of the khamsin that it would hurl its sandy tentacles far out across the Mediterranean, covering the island of Malta in a fine shroud of white powder and drifting on, losing momentum now, to touch Sicily with its arid breath. It was an evil wind, parching and mocking everything that lived and moved in its path, including man.

  The khamsin turned the road that led westwards from Bardia to Tobruk into a hot, unreal nightmare of yellow fog. It was impossible to see more than ten yards and the dust was everywhere, creeping through every chink into the 15-hundredweight Bedford truck’s cabin and coating the interior with a gritty layer. It crept up the noses and down the throats of the three occupants, itching unbearably and making it difficult to breathe. It blocked their ears and mingled with their sweat until their hair was caked and matted; it insinuated itself behind their sand goggles and turned their eyes into weeping, smarting pools of pain. Occasionally, the billows of sand ahead of the struggling vehicle would part briefly, allowing a more extensive glimpse of the road through weird, drifting tendrils; then the blinding yellow murk would close in again, its effect even more claustrophobic than before.

  Sandwiched between the monosyllabic Scots driver and a captain of the 9th Australian Infantry Division who had so far broken his silence only to swear fluently and at great length, Flying Officer George Yeoman coughed in a vain attempt to dislodge some of the cloying sand from his throat and reached for his water-bottle. He roiled a mouthful of water round his tongue and swallowed with difficulty, grimacing, for the lukewarm liquid was full of sand too.

  The Australian nudged Yeoman and offered him a cigarette. The pilot shook his head in refusal; despite the swallow of water, his mouth still felt like sandpaper. It was, he reflected, a hell of a way to spend one’s twenty-first birthday. Yet he was in no sense unhappy; on the contrary, he felt a keen anticipation for what lay ahead. Here, in the desert, there was a real challenge; a challenge presented not merely by the enemy, but by the desert itself, where the mood of the land could change from beauty to grim ugliness in the space of a few minutes.

  Yeoman, always something of a romantic, had been captivated by his first taste of North Africa, even though the hot, uncomfortable cabin of the Bedford was hardly a suitable vantage point. They had set out from Alexandria two days earlier, moving west along the coast road through El Daba, Fuka and Maaten Bagush to make their first night stop in Mersa Matruh, where they had dropped off their original passenger, an artillery subaltern, and picked up the Australian, who was on his way to join his division in Tobruk.

  Mersa Matruh had been a refreshing change after the first day’s drive, when Yeoman had quickly discovered that places such as El Daba and Fuka were simply names on the map, with no houses or any sign of habitation except, perhaps, a scatter of litter where wandering Bedouin had stopped beside an obscure waterhole. Mersa Matruh, on the other hand, had provided a remarkable contrast, with its sprawl of white houses and the cool, restful turquoise of the bay beyond. On closer inspection the town had possessed little of interest; a railway station, a church, a mosque and a few shops along what passed for the main street, and not much else. Mersa Matruh’s claim to fame, in fact, was its water, which was drawn from artesian wells and which was among the purest to be found anywhere on the fringes of the desert. It had been so for two thousand years, since the days when Antony and Cleopatra had come here to relax in the inviting sea that lapped gently against a spotless white beach.

  The following dawn, rested and washed free of the clinging sand for the time being, they had pushed on along the coast road towards Sidi Barrani. It was here, five months earlier, that a mighty Italian army under Marshal Rodolfo Graziani had assembled in a series of fortified camps stretching fifteen miles inland from the coast, ready to thrust into Egypt and raise the flag of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy over Cairo. All that had stood in Graziani’s path, outnumbered ten to one, had been the puny and ill-equipped British Western Desert Force under General O’Connor, a small and energetic Irishman whose chief weapon was his flair for unorthodox tactics.

  O’Connor’s tiny force had dug in at Mersa Matruh and prepared grimly to stop the Italians, or die in the attempt. But Graziani, preoccupied with building up strong supply lines, had never come; and O’Connor, weighing the odds and deciding that his thirty-six thousand men were a match for Graziani’s three hundred thousand, had boldly decided to take the initiative. In December 1940, with the 4th Indian Infantry Division and the 7th Armoured Division, he had penetrated the Italian lines and taken the enemy completely by surprise, smashing Graziani’s forces and chasing them into Libya in a two-day battle that effectively ended the immediate threat to Egypt.

  Yeoman recalled how, in those dark winter days of 1940, the news of O’Connor’s victory had come like a shot in the arm to the hard-pressed British people, reeling under the almost nightly hammer-blows of Hitler’s Luftwaffe and facing the dark menace of his seemingly invincible army across the Channel. O’Connor had given them what they wanted, and more. By all the rules his outnumbered force should have halted after giving the enemy a bloody nose; but in January 1941 the redoubtable general, his Western Desert Force now renamed 13th Corps and reinforced by the 6th Australian Division, pressed on to attack the Italian stronghold of Bardia and captured it in a single day, taking forty thousand prisoners. Less than three weeks later the British were in Tobruk, the next port and fortress along the coast, and another twenty-five thousand Italians were in the bag.

  There seemed to be no stopping 13th Corps. In front of O’Connor now lay the Jebel Akhdar, the fertile crescent of hills rolling down to the coastline of Cyrenaica, and beyond it the city of Benghazi. Along the coast road, which wound between the Jebel Akhdar and the sea to the Gulf of Sirte, the broken remnants of Graziani’s Tenth Army were struggling to escape into Tripolitania.

  It was now that O’Connor took his greatest gamble. Although his tanks and trucks were almost falling apart, he hurled them across the appalling, uncharted desert tracks south of Jebel Akhdar in a bid to reach the coast road ahead of the enemy and bar their retreat. On 5 February, the British spearhead made it with half an hour to spare. For the next two days, a fierce battle raged around Beda Fomm as the Italians tried desperately to break through. They failed, and when the two days were ended O’Connor had achieved complete victory. The Italian Tenth Army had been utterly destroyed, and in ten weeks the British had taken 130,000 prisoners, 400 tanks, 1,290 guns and a thousand trucks — the latter a real windfall, for it had enabled the advance to maintain its momentum.

  For a brief time, after the capture of Benghazi, it had seemed that O’Connor might continue his advance into Tripolitania and drive the Italians completely out of North Africa. It would have been a golden opportunity, but it was denied by events on the other side of the
Mediterranean. The previous November, the Italians had advanced into Greece from their bases in Albania; the Greeks hammered them in eleven days and pushed them back over the frontier. Four months later the Italians were still making no headway, although they outnumbered the Greeks by two to one. But German forces were massing in Bulgaria, along Greece’s northern frontier, and the Greeks had asked for six British divisions to meet an expected German invasion. Those divisions could come from only one place, and that was North Africa; so O’Connor’s plans for further conquest had been stifled.

  Yeoman had arrived in Egypt at the end of March to find the whole place buzzing with activity. Alexandria and Port Said were full of troops: sixty thousand of them, Australian and New Zealand infantry and British gunners, with supporting technical and mechanized units, all awaiting embarkation. The soldiers had been in a cheerful mood, laughing and joking and openly eager for a change from the endless desert. There was something romantic about fighting on Greek soil; the Allies had fought bitterly there in the previous war and had held the line successfully. There seemed no good reason why they should not do so again. There had been no pretence of secrecy; everyone, including the Arabs, was gossiping about the expeditionary force and its destination. Some, on a note of high optimism, even talked of a thrust through southern Europe to attack Germany in the rear.

  Yeoman, who had first-hand experience of the speed and thoroughness with which the Germans had tackled the campaign in France and the Low Countries in May 1940, was sceptical about the chances of the whole Greek venture, and the whirlwind events of the past ten days seemed to be bearing out his doubts and fears. On 7 April a German army had invaded Greece in three columns and the following morning the Panzers were in Salonika, isolating several Greek divisions in Thrace and severing all links between Greece and Yugoslavia. That was the latest news anyone had; it was not yet known that now, on the tenth, the first British troops to make contact with the enemy were already falling back, crumbling under a sheer weight of armour and firepower.

  Fighter squadrons of the RAF had been in constant action in Greece ever since last November, flying a mixture of Gloster Gladiators and Hawker Hurricanes, and from the reports he had heard Yeoman understood that Greece had, until now, been a sort of happy hunting-ground for fighter pilots. Just before leaving Alexandria he had talked to a pilot of No. 33 Squadron, just back from Greece, who told him that one day towards the end of February the pilots of his squadron and two others had shot down no fewer than twenty-seven Italian fighters and bombers in a single air battle. One chap, a South African flight lieutenant named Pattle, was reputed to have knocked down nearly thirty since the fighting began, and was still scoring.

  At first, Yeoman had regretted that his new posting had not taken him to one of the fighter squadrons in Greece. His heart had dropped into his boots when he had learned that his new unit, No. 493 Squadron, was a tactical reconnaissance outfit flying clapped-out old Hurricane Is and working alongside the army. There hadn’t seemed to be much future in it, especially with the Italians on the run, but now he wasn’t so sure. On the last day of March a strong German force of armour and infantry, which had been assembling in Tripolitania for some time, had struck hard at the recently-won British positions near El Agheila. Within a week the British were in full retreat, streaming back along the road they had conquered so dashingly just a few weeks earlier, and the latest rumour was that the enemy were in sight of Tobruk. Alexandria, where German propaganda was rife, had been full of wild speculation out of which only a few clear facts emerged; everything had happened so quickly that the situation at the front was utterly confused, and no one had any real idea what was going on. The German radio broadcasters, however, were placing much emphasis on the man commanding their forces in Africa; a relatively young general who, in France, had led the Panzer division which had been the first to smash its way across the River Meuse. His name was Erwin Rommel.

  Yeoman brushed sand from his arm and peered at his watch. It was noon, and the khamsin at last showed signs of blowing itself out. A cloud of blown sand parted abruptly like a bow wave in front of the Bedford and at that moment the driver slammed on his brakes without warning, sending the vehicle slewing off the road into soft sand and throwing its two passengers painfully forward. The Australian captain started swearing again, kicked open the door and jumped out, winding his scarf round his face for protection against the stinging particles. Yeoman followed suit and, as the swirling dust cleared still further, gazed in astonishment at the sight that confronted them.

  Out of the yellow fog, crawling in ghostly procession, came almost every kind of vehicle the British Army could muster, jammed bumper to bumper and crammed with soldiers. The sand had reduced men and vehicles alike to a weird yellowish white; the faces of the troops were caked in gritty masks from which haggard, red-rimmed eyes stared uncaringly. A platoon of tall Indian soldiers plodded mechanically past, their feet raising small dustclouds. Other soldiers straggled after them, all of them showing signs of utter weariness. With a sudden shock, Yeoman realized that he was looking at an army in full retreat, a retreat so demoralizing that it was dangerously close to a rout.

  A motor-cycle combination came up, skirting the edge of the column and sliding dangerously in the loose sand. The Australian captain stepped forward and flagged it down; the rider was a Military Police sergeant, who dismounted and saluted impeccably. The Australian asked him what was going on.

  The MP removed his goggles and shook his head tiredly, showering sand in all directions.

  ‘Jerry has reached Tobruk,’ he said: ‘In fact, it’s all but surrounded. The garrison there has orders to hold on while the rest of the army regroups on the frontier. I tell you, sir, it’s a complete bloody shambles. This lot —’ he waved his hand at the column — ‘are mostly green as grass, nothing like the lads who chased the Eyeties a few months ago. And the Jerries have got General O’Connor, together with General Neame. It happened a couple of days ago. Nobody knows quite what happened, but it seems they ran into a patrol while trying to get back to Tobruk.’ He eyed the Australian’s shoulder flashes. ‘I suppose you’re trying to get to Tobruk, too, sir?’ he asked. The captain nodded. ‘Well,’ the MP went on, ‘you’ll have your work cut out. The perimeter isn’t closed yet, but it might be by the time you get there. The road’s jammed solid for miles. By the way, I’d better have a look at your movement order, just to keep things straight.’

  The sergeant examined their documents, then looked at Yeoman, who was heading for Masmut, just a few miles on up the road. ‘Jerry bombed Masmut this morning,’ he told the pilot, ‘but the landing strip seems to be still in one piece and there are still planes there, although I couldn’t tell you what sort they are. You’ll be there in an hour and a half, maybe, if you get cracking now.’ He saluted again and remounted his cycle, kicking the engine into life. Dust rose around them as he moved off to continue his task of shepherding the human stream to its eventual destination somewhere on the Egyptian border. Yeoman watched him go, thinking that of all the jobs in wartime, that of the Military Police must surely be among the most thankless. No army unit was so consistently detested, and yet no unit worked so consistently hard, marshalling the constant flow of traffic to and from the front. It was too often forgotten that in a chaotic retreat, MPs were among the last troops to leave the battlefield.

  ‘Right,’ said the Australian captain, ‘let’s get on with it. We’ve a long way to go.’ They boarded the truck and the driver, looking very unhappy, ground his way into gear and brought the Bedford out of the soft sand once more. The MP had been right about the congestion; they seemed to be the only vehicle travelling west. Progress was painfully slow, as they were frequently forced off the road by larger vehicles moving in the opposite direction.

  The sandstorm had blown itself out completely now, and an unbearable sun glared down from a white-hot sky. They crawled on for another hour, and now the convoys heading for Egypt began to thin out. Half a dozen tanks chur
ned past, some of them showing the scars of battle, and after that the road was dear except for isolated traffic.

  Twenty minutes later they came to a road junction, or rather a spot where two or three rough desert tracks converged on the main road. Yeoman tapped the driver on the shoulder and pointed along one of the tracks, at the end of which, about half a mile away, he could see a cluster of tents and what looked like a series of low, sandy hummocks. ‘Over there,’ he ordered. ‘I think that’s where I get off.’

  As they drew closer, the hummocks resolved themselves into camouflage nets, draped over three Hurricane fighters. Crates and fuel drums were stacked in neat piles not far away.

  Yeoman dismounted and shook hands briefly with the Australian, wishing him good luck. The captain’s face cracked into a dusty grin. ‘Same to you, mate,’ he said. ‘Hope you make it. See you in Tripoli sometime.’ It was the longest speech he had made in two days.

  The Bedford moved off towards the Tobruk road and Yeoman made for the nearest tent, carrying his kit. There wasn’t much of it; he had learned the habit of travelling light in France, the hard way. He had not gone more than a few steps when he was halted by a grimy, steel-helmeted RAF aircraftman, armed with a .303 rifle, who demanded to see his papers. After scrutinizing them carefully, the man relaxed,

  ‘We’ve been expecting you, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s a good thing you got here when you did, because most of the squadron has pulled back and it’ll probably only be a matter of hours before we do the same. There aren’t many of us left; just half a dozen airmen, three pilots and the CO. The CO is airborne at the moment, sir, but the other officers are having lunch. Would you follow me, please?’

  The airman led Yeoman to a tent, set some distance apart from the others. Outside it, a tubby corporal was stirring a concoction which was simmering away on a battered field kitchen. He looked up and grinned as the pilot approached. ‘Afternoon, sir. I’m Davies. You’re just in time for the speciality of the house. Bully stew. No extra charge for the flies. The other gentlemen are inside. I’ll be dishing up in a minute, if you’d care to take a seat.’