Hellfire Pass to Tobruk
Wadi Halfaya was the last Axis stronghold in the Egyptian/Libyan frontier area to fall to our forces. Cyrenaica (eastern Libya) was now virtually free of German and Italian troops. We confidently expected that our armoured forces, now far away to the west, would continue their westward advance into western Libya or Tripolitania. Our task in North Africa had been successfully completed. We moved eastward, setting up camp near Sidi Barrani, well within Egypt. Rumour had it that our next destination was to be Palestine.
Our officers attempted to restore 'peacetime' order and discipline. We did interminable gun drills, went on route marches and were sent to distant strong points to dismantle, clean and re-assemble, static guns installed in them. On returning from one such mission towards the end of January 1942, we found our camp in turmoil, gun towing vehicles being loaded and hooked up to their guns and the whole regiment getting ready for imminent departure – not to Palestine but back into what news bulletins at the time referred to as 'the Western Desert'.
It appeared that a series of set-backs to the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean had allowed Rommel to replenish and strengthen his forces. He had counter-attacked in strength. Our tank losses had been heavy and we were 'making a strategic withdrawal'. If the worst came to the worst our forces would withdraw all the way to the Egyptian frontier, making no attempt this time, to hold Tobruk. How much of all this I knew at the time and how much I have learnt since, I cannot say.
Back we went westward along that now-familiar coast road. Our first halt for the night was by Fort Capuzzo. There I remember being moved by the sight of recent war graves bearing the names of eighteen and nineteen year old German soldiers who had been killed nearby.
We carried on, moving inland to bypass Tobruk on a desert highway always known as 'the Axis Road' because it had been built by German and Italian engineers during the siege. Returning to the coast road we finally halted at Gazala, forty or fifty miles west of Tobruk (see the map incorporated into the previous article 'Suez to Hellfire Pass') 231st Battery was deployed in a wadi, a relatively narrow valley that, centuries before, had been a river bed.. The wadi ran from south to north toward the sea and was an ideal gun position for us. Our howitzers, with their high trajectory, could fire westwards out of the valley, dropping our shells onto their targets, but we were invulnerable to return shell-fire from ordinary low trajectory guns whose shells would simply go over our heads.
We were of course, vulnerable to the fire of howitzers similar to our own or to air attack. In fact we never did fire from, nor were we fired upon, while we were in that wadi. I doubt if there were any enemy targets within our relatively short range. We were certainly within the range of some of their artillery though, and we didn't wish to draw attention to the position of our base.
We were at the northern end of the Gazala Line. A series of defensive positions extending from Gazala Bay, inland to Bir Hachim, held by the Free French. As well as British, South African and Free French forces there was also at least one Polish unit in the line.
We didn't, of course, just sit there waiting for the enemy to attack. Regularly, usually with just one troop (four guns) at a time we would creep out of our secure and comfortable wadi and go forward into no-man's-land or, as the top brass preferred to call it, 'the operational area'. A few miles further westward, sometimes in another wadi, sometimes on the open desert, we would line up the guns, unlimber and prepare to fire. Orders would come from the Observation Post Officer, from his vantage point further forward, to open fire on a target unseen by us – sometimes enemy transport, sometimes a suspected enemy observation post, sometimes an enemy gun position
If it were the last of these we knew that we could expect an early response. The enemy guns would fire back at us. We would dive into our hastily dug slit trenches, wait for a pause in the firing that told us the enemy gunners were bringing up more ammunition, and fire salvo after salvo at them. Usually the enemy shells landed some way from our gun position. Occasionally though they would get the range and the compass bearing dead right and enemy shells would scream overhead and crash down all around us. It was very, very frightening – but fortunately rarely lethal. In the desert much of the explosion would be lost in the sand and, so long as you were in a slit trench, the deadly shell fragments would whistle harmlessly overhead.
I remember once we were in a wadi and the enemy got right on the target. For twenty minutes or so all hell was let loose. There were shrieking shells, explosions all around us, one of our light trucks (luckily not an ammunition lorry!) was hit and caught fire. The wadi was full of dust and smoke.
When the firing subsided, a South African medic, white and shaking and carrying a first-aid box, climbed into the wadi and asked tremulously if there was anything he could do to help any survivors. He was astonished and, to be honest, so were we, to find that there were, in fact, no casualties. The sole victim had been the burnt-out truck.
We occasionally listened to news bulletins on the radio. A posh English voice would announce that 'Our mobile artillery has been active in the Western desert today. There was an artillery duel and an enemy battery has been silenced'. I reckon that a few miles away German gunners would have been listening to an identical bulletin, in German! I have little doubt that the 'silenced battery' had been silenced by the fact that the battery's quota of ammunition for the day had been used up or that they wanted to get back to their base before dark or some other similarly unheroic reason.
I have recently enjoyed the friendship of a German ex-serviceman just a few years younger than me. He had been in the German Navy but he had friends who had been Kannoniers (gunners) on guns that could very well have been the ones that fired at us. They told him that in their opinion medium artillery (our kind of guns) on both sides had been completely useless in the desert. I don't think that that was quite true. They did, I have little doubt, play a part in forcing the surrender of such strong points as Hellfire Pass and Bardia – but in the open desert against highly mobile forces, they had very little, if any, value. Now our 25 pounders and the German 88 mm anti-tank guns (the Germans called them Panzer Jäger or tank hunters) were a different matter altogether!
Be that as it may, now that I am 87 and have a number of good friends in Germany I am quite pleased (and a little amused) at the thought that throughout World War II I may never have actually managed to kill anybody!
Sometimes enemy 'spotter planes' would fly low over the desert, presumably photographing the area in preparation for a forthcoming attack. We all immediately grabbed the captured or abandoned Italian rifles that by then we had all acquired and fired off round after round as it flew, relatively slowly, overhead. We never, as far as we knew, scored a lethal hit. However when one such plane was brought down we were pleased to learn that the pilot had a map on which our wadi was marked as being an area where very heavy small arms fire could be expected!
In the late spring of 1942, I think probably in late April or early May, our familiar old 6in howitzers were withdrawn and we were supplied with new 4.5in diameter gun/howitzers, throwing a 60lb shell. They were said to incorporate the best qualities of a field gun and a howitzer. They had a long barrel and a range in the region of twenty miles. That was over twice that of our old howitzers. They also had a 'split trail', which divided into two hinged parts that could be pulled apart into a V shape when in action. This meant that targets could be selected over quite a wide arc without the time-and-energy-wasting chore of moving the trail.
We moved out of our secure little wadi onto the open desert.. There was solid rock just a few inches below the desert sand. Royal Engineers blasted out a gun pit to give the gun some protection, and a number of slit trenches for us.
There was a Stuka dive-bombing raid on our new gun position. We saw the planes approaching and took to our slit trenches, hoping they would fly over. They didn't. They wheeled in the sky and dived almost vertically at us with a terrifying scream. Again our Italian rifles came ineffectually into action. One plane seemed to be diving directly at the slit trench in which my mate and I were crouched! We could clearly see the pilot sitting in his cockpit. At the very last moment, when we felt sure they were going to crash straight onto us, the planes flattened out, dropping their bombs as they did so.
There was a series of ear-splitting explosions. The sides of our slit trench shook and bomb splinters whistled through the air over our heads. A black smoke engulfed our gun position. Once again though, almost miraculously, neither we, nor our guns were hit. The bombs exploded all round us but did no real damage at all.
It was at about this time that I was told that I had been selected for a course for Observation Post Assistants and that I would be going back to Cairo for it 'in a few weeks time'. Rommel made sure that I didn't go!
Troop movements were going on all around us. It was obvious something was going to happen fairly soon. Our Battery Commander – a Major Brewster – gathered us all together and gave us a pep talk. It was the first and only time that this happened. He told us that, as we had suspected, we were preparing for an attack – but so was the enemy! No-one knew who would make the first strike or when. He also told us what were believed to be the long-term strategic aims of the Nazis. This was to create a pincer movement, with one claw of the pincer striking through southern Russia and the Caucuses to Syria and the oil-rich Middle East, while the other claw, led by Rommel and his German Afrikakorps fought their way through Egypt into Palestine to complete the pincer movement and meet up with the German army from Russia. The Soviet Army was, he said, heroically foiling that plan at Stalingrad and in the Caucasus. It was up to us to emulate them in the North African desert. It sounded plausible to those of us who had learned some basic geography at school and, looking back over the years, I think that most of us did feel inspired.
Meanwhile life went on. The 18th May was my twenty-first birthday, the day on which I officially 'came of age'; the most important birthday of my life and the first one on which I didn't get a single birthday card! I had bought a bottle of scotch from the NAAFI wagon (it was only 150 Egyptian piastres – about £1.50) and my mate Jim and I had a little bottle party in our bivvy tent. It was lucky that Rommel didn't choose that night for his attack. The crew of No 4 gun of 'B' Troop would have been somewhat depleted!
Just over a week later that I was one of an afternoon bathing party. These were regular events in which those of us who enjoyed a swim were driven down a real break-neck pass from the escarpment to the coastal plain and then on to Gazala Bay where there was an empty beach and warm clear water in which we could swim, relax, and forget for a while that there was a war on. I seized every opportunity to be included in a bathing party. This was easily arranged. Some of my fellow gunners didn't really like sea bathing and many – astonishingly considering the total lack of privacy in which we lived – would have come if they had possessed swimming trunks. They just didn't like the idea of being naked in the open air!
However this particular idyll was brought to an abrupt close. There was a sound like distant thunder and far away across the bay we could see the rising smoke and dust clouds of battle. Rommel had made the first move and the attack on the Gazala Line had begun. We hastily pulled on our shorts and shirts, stuffed our feet into our army boots and clambered back into the 30cwt truck that had brought us. Within half an hour we were back on the gun site. Crews were standing by the guns but we had not yet received the order to fire. South African infantry in front of us had come under heavy fire and infantry attack, and word was that our Observation Post Assistant, a Bombardier whom most of us knew, had been killed.
We didn't go into action. Within a couple of days it transpired that the attack on the northern end of the Gazala line had been just a feint. Rommel had taken his tanks far to the south and had bypassed the southern extremity of the line penetrating the region in our rear, between Gazala and Tobruk. Fierce tank battles between British and enemy forces were taking place in an area that became known as 'the cauldron'
We left the gun site that had been so painstakingly prepared for us by the Royal Engineers just a few weeks earlier. For a fortnight we were constantly on the move, snatching an hour or two's sleep here and there whenever an opportunity presented itself, striking at enemy armoured columns and 'soft transport' when and where we could. Fierce tank battles raged around us.
Finally, it must have been a week or ten days into June, we found ourselves at a position a few miles south of Tobruk at a place named, obviously by the British army, 'Knightsbridge'. Our guns were pointed towards a high escarpment perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Distances are deceptive in the desert.
We fired salvo after salvo at unseen targets a few miles away over that ridge. We were told that we were firing at 'soft enemy transport'. As the day wore on we continued firing at shorter and shorter ranges. Suddenly, my mate said to me, 'What are those spurts of sand all round the gun position – is it some kind of an insect?' I saw them too – and recognised them instantly as bullets hitting the desert surface all round us! We had all been concentrating on serving the gun but, looking up at the escarpment, we could see the silhouettes of half a dozen enemy tanks. They were machine-gunning us from the cliff top!
Our guns were not designed, nor did they have the gun-sights to target, relatively small objects. We could have dropped shells all round the tanks – and no doubt that is just what we had been doing all day – but only direct hits, which we just couldn't deliver, would put them out of action. If we had had 25 pounders the situation would have been very different. We would, no doubt, have targeted the tanks, possibly hit some of them and forced the remainder to withdraw or, just as likely, fire from the tanks would have picked us off one by one and they would have continued their inexorable advance down the escarpment (there were, no doubt, passes down it) towards Tobruk.
We were ordered to 'limber up' our guns to their gun-towing vehicles and withdraw. Battery Commander Major Brewster drove the 8cwt truck in which he travelled up and down between us and the escarpment, raising dense clouds of dust to obscure the view of the machine-gunners on the cliff top. This made it possible for us to get beyond range unscathed. We were to drive on through Tobruk's defensive perimeter and await further orders.
Our first task was at the western extremity of Tobruk's defences, where we covered the withdrawal into Tobruk of the remaining troops from the Gazala Line. It appeared that the original plan to withdraw all forces to the Egyptian frontier, abandoning Tobruk, had been changed. The town was now to be held and we were to be part of its garrison. I learned years later that this was due to a last-minute intervention by Churchill – an intervention that certainly cost me my liberty for the next three years!
Expecting evacuation, the town's defences had been allowed to run down – anti-tank mines transferred elsewhere, defensive ditches filled in by blown sand, barbed wire allowed to decay. The troops available at the last minute to comprise the garrison were totally unbalanced. There were, for instance two regiments (the 67th and the 68th) of Medium Artillery – 32 howitzers and gun/hows., all but useless in mobile tank warfare. What had been needed was two or more regiments of anti-tank guns or 25 pounders!
We dug ourselves into a position south-south east of the town. Immediately behind us were two troops of the Royal Tank Regiment with Valentine tanks. Behind them, in the distance, could be seen the warehouse of the Bulk NAAFI, a well-known Tobruk landmark.
During the evening of 19th June we were told that the German armoured divisions were bypassing Tobruk on their way further east. We settled down to sleep that night fully expecting a long siege.
The morning proved otherwise! We wakened to the thunder of gunfire and orders to stand-to on the guns. Stuka dive-bombers flew above us picking their targets where they could. Enemy shells screamed overhead, landing all round our gun position. Even more menacing were the airburst shells that exploded overhead, hurling jagged chunks of metal in all directions. We were too busy loading, aiming and firing the gun to dwell on these perils.
The two troops of the Tank Regiment passed through our gun positions and went forward to engage the enemy.
The targets for our fire grew closer and closer until we knew that our shells must be exploding just beyond the low hills in front of us – surely no more than half a mile away!
We were ordered to limber up and withdraw in a north-westerly direction. We did so under heavy fire. We went into action again in a wide valley with our guns covering the distant desert highway into Tobruk. The bulk NAAFI was now within our arc of fire. There was no respite from the artillery and aerial bombardment. We fired at fresh targets as bombs and shells burst round us and our position was swept with small-arms fire. Enemy tanks appeared, moving across our front past the bulk NAAFI towards the town of Tobruk. We fired at them through open sights. Did we hit any? I have no idea. The smoke and dust of battle made it impossible to tell.
Night fell at last and firing on both sides subsided. As we pulled the blankets over our heads and settled down beside the gun for the night we were full of foreboding about what the next day would bring.
Dawn broke on 21st June on what could have been a scene from hell. Broken down, burnt out and destroyed vehicles littered the surface of the desert. In every direction columns of black smoke rose skywards.
A German spotter plane flew at low level over our position. We reached for the captured Italian rifles that most of us carried and fired an ineffectual volley at it. It was the last shot that we were to fire in World War II. Minutes later, as we prepared the guns for a last stand, the order came through from General Klopper, the South African General in command in Tobruk. We were ordered to destroy all transport, put our guns out of action and surrender.
Someone with a sense of the dramatic sounded the last post. A German staff car roared up and an officer, furious to see our vehicles already blazing, directed us along a desert track to the barbed wire enclosure where we were held prior to being transported in batches to Benghazi for shipment across the Med. to Italy.
The 21st June 1942 saw the end of our active military careers. It also saw the lowest ebb of British fortunes in North Africa – to be spectacularly restored a few months later after the carnage of El Alamein.
Jim Palmer, the other Ipswich member of 'B' Troop's No. 4 Gun team, and I stayed together in prison camps in Italy and, after the collapse of Mussolini's Italy, in an Arbeitskommando (working camp) in Zittau, a small town in Eastern Germany. We made our own way through Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia when Nazi Germany too collapsed.
My personal story of the fall of Tobruk in June 1942 has a postscript.
Many years later my wife and I and our two then-teenage sons, while on holiday in Austria, shared a cabin on a mountain cable railway with a similar German family. I remarked to the father that he spoke extremely good English (much better than my German!)
'Yes', he said, 'I was a prisoner of war in England for three years during World War II' 'Really', I said, 'and where were you captured?'
'Tobruk', he replied, 'in November 1942', adding – in case I had never heard of the place – 'in North Africa'.
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