The Sahara (23 page)

At the story’s close, when Military Police arrive to arrest Lutz, the German “walked to the door with the lieutenant, and then turned back to look at them once more. He said, ‘It has been something. All against one - against the greater enemy. I have learned a lot.’ Then he gave them that silly stiff bow again, the door flapped twice behind him and that was that.”

Cecil Beaton recorded his thoughts on people confronting the desert in his wartime diaries, noting:

Cairo demands too little of a man, and the desert too much. Existence in the desert is, in its way, as unnatural as that of Cairo, for a false reality prevails. The desert is an unnatural habitat for the average human being... Life here is primeval, and from this very simplicity seems to spring a new contentment. Often the men become so contented that they are said to be “sand happy”.

Better known as a high-society photographer, Beaton was in the Western Desert to take photographs for the British Ministry of information. He observed at first hand the truism that life in the military involves a high degree of “Hurry up and wait”, with the lulls being longer and more numerous than any episodic action. He describes this inactivity in
Self Portrait with Friends
: “One of the worst aspects of desert life is the men’s lack of reading matter. However conscientious they are about their duties, much of their time necessarily must be spent ‘hanging about being bored’.”

Beaton was also present at a time of movement, with both sides engaged in attacks, counter-attacks and retreats over hundreds of miles of flat desert. Remembering one such attack he writes, “Dudley Barker asked excitedly, ‘Do you want to take some action pictures?’ ‘Then it has started in the desert?’ ‘Yes, this morning.’ This was how I heard that Rommel had attacked. One of the Anglo-Egyptian secretaries squeaked up, ‘Oh, I can’t get a thrill out of the desert any longer. It’s always a case of someone going backwards or forwards.’”

If the “going backwards or forwards” of the war had potential for farce, Spike Milligan articulated this and other more madcap aspects of the war. Milligan especially highlights the absurdity in the midst of what others would see rather as a time of historical import. Serving as a signaller with the Royal Artillery, Gunner Milligan took the most ridiculous elements of military life into his post-war comedic career, creating the Goon Show, the forebear to countless later absurdist comedians from Monty Python to Eddie Izzard.

In a series of memoirs about his wartime service including
“Rommel?” “Gunner Who?’:· A Confrontation in the Desert
, Milligan displays an artist’s eye for detail as in the following passage:

Twixt Tizi Ouzou and Beni Mansour we passed mountains each side of 8,000 feet, and numerous rock-hewn tunnels... ‘‘Attention! Rallientair!” signs appeared frequently. We saw camel trains all laden with goods. They followed ancient camel tracks two or three hundred feet above us, moving slowly with a dignity no civilization had managed to speed up. At sundown, the Arabs turned towards Mecca to carry out their devotions, a religious people, more than I could say for our lot, the only time they knelt was to pick up money.

Milligan displays sympathy towards the locals while further mocking his brothers-in-arms, observing: “Looking along the line, one caught sight of the odd Gunner piddling against the wheels. I don’t understand it! They have to clean their own transport, and then, when they’ve got the whole of Africa, they piss on their own lorries!” His observations about cultural misunderstandings on the part of the British soldiers are also put to comic effect: “Marches took us through timeless Arab villages, Rouiba, Ain-Taya, Fondouk, when we halted I’d try the Arab coffee; piping hot, sweet, delicious. I watched Gunner White sip the coffee then top it up with water! I explained the water was for clearing the palate. ‘I thought it was coolin’ it down,’ said the descendant of the Crusaders.”

In a more traditional mode, the war also produced a number of exceptional poems rather than desert-poets, with the notable exception of Keith Douglas (1920-44). Killed three days after taking part in the D-Day landings, Douglas’ desert-inspired poetry is his best, most poignant work. In “Vergissmeinnicht (Forget Me Not)”, an Allied combatant returns to the scene of a battle three weeks after it took place and comes across a German corpse. Like others who wrote from the desert, Douglas displays no hatred towards his declared enemies but instead recognizes the random nature of survival and mortality, sparing a thought for those left behind. In the case of the dead German, “the soldier sprawling in the sun”, his sweetheart is the focus:

the dishonoured picture of his girl

who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.

in a copybook gothic script.

Another verse by Douglas, “Cairo Jag”, has a soldier on leave wondering, “Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake”? In spite of the available distractions, the soldier’s mind returns to a recently fought battle, and he imagines the dead as neglected tourists:

But by a day’s travelling you reach a new world

the vegetation is of iron

dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery

the metal brambles have no flowers or berries

and there are all sorts of manure, you can imagine

the dead themselves, their boots, clothes and possessions

clinging to the ground, a man with no head

has a packet of chocolate and a souvenir of Tripoli.

Hamish Henderson (1919-2002), once referred to as the most important Scottish poet since Robert Burns, saw active service as an Intelligence Officer in North Africa and Italy. Henderson’s time in the desert inspired his
Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica
. First published in 1948, he described them as “poems of passive suffering... of stoicism”. Like others who served in the desert, Henderson highlights the unity of soldiery. He never sees Germans as the enemy, preferring to single out individuals who have been forced by circumstances to confront each other, with the Sahara as the common enemy. In the first elegy, he writes:

There are many dead in the brutish desert,

who lie uneasy

among the scrub in this landscape of the half-wit

stunted ill-will. For the dead land is insatiate

and necrophilious. The sand is blowing about still.

Many who for various reasons, or because

of mere unanswerable compulsion, came here...

And sleep now. Sleep here the sleep of the dust.

In April 1945 Henderson was personally responsible for accepting the surrender of Italy from Marshal Graziani. He kept the signed order in his pocket until the day he died in 2002, 57 years after the war’s end.

While the desert inspired many poets, journalists who wrote about the war did so with more immediacy, reflecting deadlines imposed on them by distant editors. Some of the more famous American names who reported from North Africa included Walter Cronkite, the
New Yorker’s
A. J. Leibling, Don Whitehead and Ernie Pyle, who wrote for Scripps-Howard Newspapers. One of the most popular American reporters of his

day, Pyle’s column was syndicated in more than 300 newspapers in the US. His personal, even folksy, writing style and his tendency to see the war through the eyes of the ordinary soldier made his readers feel personally involved in the war in North Africa. Pyle’s reports, often filled with informal observations and filed from the front line, provided details that Americans at home came to rely on for a sense of what was happening. A great supporter of the common soldier, Pyle’s reputation among the troops was enhanced when his calls for “fight pay” led to Congress passing a bill that increased each American combat troop’s salary by $10 a month.

In January 1943, while with American forces at Biskra, Algeria - but specifically not mentioning this in line with wartime censorship rules - Pyle offered a typically chatty description of the Saharan scenery:

The only way I can picture it for you is to suggest that you try to visualise some flat endless space in the desert of our own Southwest, with purple mountains in the distance and sand everywhere. Put an oasis of date palms down upon it, so big it would take an hour to walk from one end to the other... it does rain here, but very seldom. Soldiers who have lived knee-deep in the perpetual winter mud of the coastal belt call this the best place in Africa to be.

Ernie Pyle was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for distinguished war correspondence. He was killed the next April, covering the war in the Pacific.

Desert Warfare

Of the many British journalists who covered the war, Alan Moorehead with the
Daily Express
, and Alexander Clifford, with the
Daily Mail,
were among the best known. In
The Conquest of North Africa: 1940-1943
, Clifford writes about the hit and run tactics of the “Jock Columns”, so-called after their originator, Brigadier Jock Campbell. Understanding the desert was all, as Clifford says: “The British commanders dug right down to the fundamental principle of the desert, to the rule that everyone up there sooner or later comes to recognize: use the desert, make the desert help you, play the desert’s game.”

The Jock Columns were small, self-sufficient vehicle patrols that would spring up seemingly from nowhere to harass German forces when they were least expecting it. Clifford goes on to say, “This was true desert warfare-something that could never be done in a country like France or England or the jungles of Malaya. It was making a friend of the desert, this taking advantage of every opportunity this peculiar battle-field offered ... There was a German report found near Tobruk, written by a senior officer, which said that the British had forgotten more about patrolling than the Germans had ever learned.”

These lessons were learnt in the decade before the start of the war by that assortment of desert-lovers who explored the Sahara, Ralph Bagnold foremost among them. While Bagnold was on his way to East Africa his ship was forced to stop in Egypt for repairs, so he went to Cairo to visit old friends. While there he was asked as the best-known exponent of desert driving whether he could form a specialist desert reconnaissance unit. The time he spent “messing about” in the desert was suddenly an asset. In double-time Bagnold created what was the Long Range Desert Group, or LRDG: its unofficial motto was
Non vi Sed Arte
, Not by Strength but by Guile.

A combination of disparate factors, including Bagnold’s knowledge of sand and cars and his love of adventure, went to make the LRDG the valuable force it became. Sending small units hundreds of miles behind enemy lines, it carried out invaluable intelligence operations, typically engaging the enemy only when forced to, if spotted or attacked. Writing in his
African Trilogy
, Moorehead describes them as “a collection of young men of the commando type. They were volunteers and trained men. They had their headquarters in the caves of Siwa Oasis and from there they used to set out on incredible journeys many hundreds of miles inside enemy territory. Their safety was the vastness of the desert. They struck unexpectedly by night and got away.”

Men of the LRDG on patrol

Winston Churchill, writing in his own history of the Second World War, spoke admiringly of the LRDG, noting in particular a detour British forces took around the Mareth Line, French-built fortifications in southern Tunisia that were supposed to keep the Italians out, but which they and the Germans actually used against the British. As Churchill explains, “The route had formerly been pronounced by the French as impossible for vehicles, but it had been reconnoitred in January by the Long Range Desert Group and declared feasible if difficult. Here was not the least valuable of the many services rendered throughout the African campaign by this hardy and highly mobile reconnaissance unit.”