Interlude at Giarabub

IN December, 1940, Mr. Churchill stirred up speculation round the operations of the 6th Australian Division Cavalry Regiment which was then laying siege to Giarabub. Telling of an exploit of the regiment Mr. Churchill described the cavalry as swooping down on an Italian force "sword in hand."

The phrase was seized upon by some unwary editors in Britain, Australia and the United States of America. They rolled it on their pens and dwelt lovingly upon it. They told their readers that there was evidence that in modern battle the fine tradition of the cavalry, of soldiers mounted on good horses charging their enemies with glittering sabres, still survived.

The idea enshrined a pretty sentiment; but unhappily the picture was as far from the truth as that newspaper report evolved by the harassed journalists in the J. M. Barrie novel, who elaborated a short cable dispatch that the Zulus had taken umbrage into a long and exciting story, documented and circumstantial, that the Zulus in South Africa had revolted and captured the important town of Umbrage.

It did not take long to establish that Mr. Churchill's phrase was no more than a vivid figure of speech, the type of phrase an old cavalryman like Churchill might have been expected to employ. Except in rare circumstances, the modern cavalryman uses a machine gun instead of a sword and moves about in a tracked carrier, and the Australians at Giarabub were a motorised force, few of whom would have been more proficient in the use of a sword than of a boomerang. All of which does not imply that the fighting they were doing round Giarabub in December, 1940, and January, February and March, 1941, was less dashing or spectacular than the fighting done by any force of horsed cavalry in history.

The Libyan oasis of Giarabub lies in the heart of a harsh, drab wilderness. It is situated about a hundred and sixty miles south of Sollum and the Mediterranean. The Great Sand Sea stretches away like a shimmering ocean in illimitable yellow waves, south of the oasis. North, east and west Giarabub looks out over waterless valleys carved by forgotten glaciers in past ages, grotesque craggy hills chiselled by the timeless winds, morasses of dark, forbidding sand which would engulf any vehicle before it had travelled a dozen yards.

Such was Giarabub when the Australians came to it in December, 1940. It was Mussolini's loneliest and farthest outpost in Libya, a stronghold in the forsaken land of sun and sand whose presence, with its garrison of Italian troops, was a constant threat to the British-held oasis of Siwa, a few miles away across the frontier of Egypt.

The problem of assaulting and capturing Giarabub, itself no small one, was complicated by religious considerations. Giarabub held the tomb of the Moslem prophet Mohamed Ben Ali el Senussi. It was sacred in the eyes of the Senussi Sect of Mohammedans. And the Senussi were not only notable warriors themselves but also influential disciples of the Prophet whom no nation at war in the desert would lightly antagonise.

The Australians moved out to Giarabub from Mersa Matruh, halting at Siwa on the way. They travelled roughly the route Alexander the Great and his army had followed twenty-three centuries earlier when the conquering Macedonian made his pilgrimage to Siwa to consult the Oracle. The track was as primitive as a Central Australian camel pad. The yellow miles seemed endless. Nothing broke the flat face of the desert except an occasional hillock. The winter sun softened the sharp edge of the desert wind by day, but the nights were as pitilessly cold as iced steel.

Always, even in winter, the mirage shimmered ahead. It did not resemble the illusory lakes of water that thirst stricken travellers are supposed to see in the desert. It looked more like a grass fire burning with silver flames. Presently, hills rose ahead of the Australians. They were not like any hills the men from the Pacific had seen, but evil, ogreish in their contorted grotesquerie.

"The Mountains of the Moon," a trooper said, and the name clung to them.

These hills were the natural outposts of Siwa. The road threaded its way among them for eight or nine miles. Then, suddenly, the hills fell behind, and the Australians were in flat country again, with Siwa a mile or so ahead. It was like coming to a town designed by Walt Disney. A hill overgrown with the ruins of houses in which dead-and-gone Siwans had once lived rose, dominating the oasis, among the green of date palms. The Australians almost expected to see gnome-like Disney figures appear among the ruins, but nothing stirred there, nobody came to greet them.

The Siwans, an uncleanly, degenerate people, eyed the carriers and trucks with indifference. They were accustomed to the sight of troops. A small British garrison had been stationed in the oasis for months, as a precaution against a move on Siwa from Giarabub, and white men in khaki uniforms were no novelty to the indolent natives. They did not seem to care that war might roll on to their doorstep at any moment if the Italians should yield to an impulse to cross the frontier. They had lost interest even in the guns and the barbed wire defences surrounding the oasis. The war was no affair of theirs, anyway. . . .

The Australians halted at Siwa and washed their desert-grimed bodies in the pools fed by volcanic hot springs, bubbling up perhaps from a subterranean river unmeasured depths beneath the earth's crust. They dived and swam in Cleopatra's Pool, in which, runs the legend, Egypt's lively queen once bathed on a visit to Siwa. They explored the ruins of the Sanctuary of Jupiter Ammon and, in the dim light of day struggling in through gaps in the wall, inspected the tumbledown Sanctuary to which men had come in ancient times to hear the wisdom of the Oracle. They munched Siwa dates, the one product of the oasis which finds a world market. And then, leaving a skeleton force in Siwa, they moved on across the frontier to the harsh wasteland surrounding Giarabub.

Here, living in the sandhills, they settled to a kind of brigand existence. They harried the Italian frontier posts wherever they could reach them in hit-and-run raids, swooping down on such points as Garn and Maddalena in the darkness, setting about supply columns moving through the desert to Giarabub itself. It was a dangerous life, a hard life, but a carefree life carefree, anyway, for men who could accept the chance that it might be cut short by a bullet.

The winter cold struck like a knife. Night temperatures were often six or seven degrees below freezing-point. It was necessary some nights to run the engines of the carriers for a few minutes every hour to protect them from freezing. The regiment's commanding officer, a hard-bitten, leather-skinned veteran of Gallipoli and France in World War I told me: "I was on the Somme in the coldest winter for sixty years, but I never felt cold like this." And then as the sun strengthened and winter died, the dust rose. One storm blew for a week without ceasing. Flying sand cut every inch of paint from the vehicles, like an industrial sand-blasting machine. But the hardships of life round Giarabub did not bother these cavalrymen. They were tasting war, the real thing, at last.

Steadily they closed in on Giarabub, cutting it off from supplies, throttling the garrison as a man throttles his opponent with a stranglehold. There was nothing spectacular yet. They had to tread cautiously. They were a light force, and the Italians inside Giarabub numbered about twelve hundred, armed with artillery as well as light automatic weapons and rifles. There were also six hundred or so Libyans with the Italians, but they didn't count for much since they had no heart for Mussolini's fight. Once the Australians appeared they deserted whenever they could slip away, deeming the risks not worth the meagre rations. But gradually the Australians and the troop of British artillery with them stiffened the pressure on the garrison, edging nearer, making the Italians' daily life a nightmare.

The Australian has one characteristic in which he excels any soldier on earth - a gift of laughter at the grimmest times. One day Italian bombers, trying to alleviate the pressure on Giarabub, came over the Australian positions and bombed them. One man was killed, and a burial party, accompanied by the padre, set out to lay him in a soldier's grave among the sands where he had died a soldier's death. They unshipped their shove s at the appointed spot and started to dig. A hard-bitten trooper, stripped to the waist, was standing in the deepening grave shovelling industriously when he paused to wipe away the sweat and, glancing round, noticed that the rest of the party had disappeared.

He blinked, then saw that his comrades had scattered and were lying flat among the surrounding sandhills. Then he became aware of something else which, in his preoccupation with the sand he was shovelling out of the grave, had escaped him earlier-a nearing drone of aircraft engines. He glanced up and saw a formation of bombers flying towards him. And he saw that their wings displayed the black crosses of the Axis. He tossed his shovel away, transferred his fascinated gaze from the approaching bombers to the canvas-wrapped body of his dead comrade stretched near the grave and said:

F*** you, mate! I need this hole more than you do right now."

And without ado he dived flat into the bottom of the grave, snuggling into the sand safe from the bombs that came hurtling down a few moments later.

Another trooper, out on patrol one afternoon in the rugged, wadi-seamed country round the oasis, crept up to the officer in command and said, pointing:

"There's an Italian standing over on that ridge, sir."

The officer looked long and hard, then shook his head.

"No," he said, "you're wrong. That's a kerosene tin."

The trooper looked unconvinced, but went his way without arguing. He returned a few minutes later and tapped the officer on the shoulder.

"Well" the officer said. "What is it now?"

"You know that kerosene tin on the ridge over there?" the trooper asked.

"Yes. What about it?"

"Well, sir, if you take a good look now you'll see another kerosene tin has come up and is having a talk to it."

These Australians were anything but frivolous in action. They fought when they had to fight like ferocious killers. But, away from battle, they were ready to turn any incident into a jest. They were avid radio listeners which was hardly surprising, since the radio was the only means they had of learning the news of the outside world. They listened to the B.B.C. for information, but it was to Berlin and Rome that they tuned-in for entertainment-the Berlin and Rome news sessions!

One night I was sitting at a receiving set with a group of men. Berlin was on the air, and a certain Miss Davis, an American, was telling the world of the happy life the German people were leading. She described the gaiety of Berlin, the development of music under the Nazis, the richness of the food the German people were eating, the ineffectiveness of R.A.F. bombing raids and, in general, the joyousness of the daily round and common task in Germany at war. We sat there in the desert night under a sky alight with stars, the sandhills bulking around us like soft dark ramparts, and we listened in admiration (admiration, that was, for Miss Davis's powers of invention, which must have been considerable even in those days of German victories). She ended her talk and there was a moment's silence.

Then an Australian voice from the farther shadows said with feeling:

"Well, after listening to that, I feel we ought to give 'em England and apologise for the state it's in!"

And so the days round Giarabub went by, sun-filled, dusty days of boredom, punctuated by moments of comedy and, now and then, a moment of poignant drama. I lived through one of these moments of drama-perhaps the sharpest in the whole siege until the final battle was fought-beside the chief actor in it on a rugged brown escarpment under a mile from Giarabub's guns one brilliant March afternoon when the air was soft with the coming of Spring.

"I'm going to have a look at Giarabub," the lieutenant-colonel commanding the regiment had said after lunch that day. "Care to come?"

Two other Australian war correspondents - Gavin Long, now Official War Historian, and Chester Wilmot, Australian Broadcasting Commission correspondent - the officer commanding the British artillery troop attached to the cavalry and I set out with the colonel in his car. We travelled for many miles through the wasteland round Giarabub, halting here and there while the colonel searched for traces indicating that enemy patrols had been on the prowl. He knew every inch of that section of the desert. Each knoll, boulder and wadi was like a fingerpost to him. Finally, he drove us to a ridge overlooking Giarabub. We climbed out of the car and left it half-way up the reverse slope of the ridge.

"They'll be able to see us up here," the colonel said, as we climbed the slope. "They might throw two or three shells over, but you'd be dead unlucky to be hit."

There was a kind of saddle in the ridge, and we walked out into the middle of it and looked down on Giarabub. At that time, the Italians, cut off from their supply bases by land, were running stores into the oasis by air, and as we watched two enemy aircraft flew down low over the town and dropped bundles to the beleaguered garrison.

"They've got their guns grouped round the mosque," the colonel said, pointing to the white minaret of the mosque holding the tomb of Mohamed Ben Ali el Senussi; it rose straight and gleaming in the forefront of the town. "They know we can't shell them effectively for fear of hitting the mosque and rousing Moslem feeling against us."

We were standing watching when the shelling began. There was a crackle of broken air, and a shell fell far to the right of us. Another shell came over. It came nearer than the first.

"They seem to be ranging on us, sir," the British artillery officer murmured.

The colonel nodded, and we turned away to descend the slope. Two more shells came over in quick succession. They were closer; much closer. We ran for it. I do not know how many more shells came over. There could have been seven or eight. I was too intent on pelting down the slope as fast as I could run in the heavy going to have time for counting them.

A shell burst about twenty yards away. I was running beside the colonel and I heard him say: "They've hit me."

The momentum of his speed carried him on a few paces, staggering, into hallow depression. Then, with the blood draining away from under the tanned skin of his face, he slid down on the sand and rolled on his back. We staunched the flow of blood with a pad from a field dressing, and lay there listening to the shells coming over.

The artillery officer was a few yards lower down the slope and he called to us: "I'll go and get the car and bring it as near as we dare. You'll have to carry him down."

We were in dead ground and the shelling eased off, then stopped, while the artilleryman was away fetching the car. The colonel, who had been lying in a coma, with eyes half-shut, roused himself.

"It was the backlash got me," he whispered. "The Italian shells don't usually . . . have any backlash."

The artillery officer drove the car as far up the slope as he dared, and halted it. Wilmot, Long and I lifted the colonel and carried him down to the car. Then we headed the car for headquarters.

It must have been an agonising journey for the colonel. There was no track. We jolted over patches of uneven sandstone, we slithered through soft sand. "Take it easy," he murmured once, but that was all.

We were nearing our journey's end when he forced his lips to smile and whispered:

"Sorry to be such a nuisance to you fellows".

We reached headquarters and handed him over to the care of the regiment's doctor. He shook his head and told us quietly that he gave the colonel only the barest fighting chance. A wireless message was sent asking that a plane should be sent to carry the colonel back to hospital, but we who had been with him, and his officers and men who had seen him brought in, believed that the effort to save his life would be useless, that he was a doomed man.

We watched the ambulance drive him away to the nearest air landing-ground with the feeling that he was fighting his last battle. But there was a bigger heart than we had known in that tall, brown-skinned Australian who had fought as a boy in World War I and was fighting as a man in World War 11. He won his solitary battle lying in a hospital bed in Cairo, and to-day, a brigadier, he is in the field again, commanding fighting troops in the Battle of the Pacific.