Читать книгу Tales from the Special Forces Club - Sean Rayment - Страница 8

‘Danger has some kind of satanic appeal to me. I am drawn towards it in an octopus-like grip of fear.’

Major-General David Lloyd Owen, the commander of the Long Range Desert Group

In addition to the SOE, the Second World War saw the emergence of private armies, those units which became the special forces. This was partly because the rules of warfare had changed, and the vast distances over which the conflict was being played demanded something new. In the North African campaign, for example, the theatre of operations was the size of Europe, with most of the fighting taking place along or in close proximity to the Mediterranean coast. This meant that small, self-contained military units could disappear into the vastness of the desert and monitor the activities of the enemy unseen and unheard.

Every commander wanted to know what his enemy opposite number was doing or planning, and any unit which could help achieve this was worth its weight in gold. The Long Range Desert Group was created during that campaign in July 1940, about the same time that the SOE became operational, specifically to conduct long-range reconnaissance and raids deep behind enemy lines. It was founded by Major Ralph Bagnold and originally called Long Range Patrol.

When I began carrying out research for this book and inquired amongst veterans of the Second World War who, if anyone, might be able to help me paint a picture of what life was like operating deep behind enemy lines in one of the most hostile environments on earth, one name kept surfacing.

‘Speak to Jimmy Patch,’ I was told by members of the Special Forces Club. ‘He was there, he did the business. Fought in the desert,’ said one veteran who got to know Jimmy after the war, ‘and was captured by the Germans but escaped.’ ‘He’ll have a good tale to tell, if you can get him to talk,’ said another. Clearly Jimmy Patch was something of a legend within the Long Range Desert Group.

So on a cold January morning in 2011 it was with a keen sense of anticipation that I visited Jimmy, now 92, at his wonderfully serene hillside home in rural Kent.

‘I’m not sure there’s very much I can tell you,’ said Jimmy diffidently. ‘But why don’t we have a cup of tea and then we can chat.’

Fortified by a cup of tea and some of my wife’s home-made cake, Jimmy began to talk.

* * *

Jimmy’s life in the special forces began while he was stationed in a large, tented camp on the outskirts of Cairo in the summer of 1941. One day as he walked through the pristine, whitewashed headquarters of the Royal Artillery Depot at Al Maza with his friend Bill Morrison, he saw a note pinned to a noticeboard bearing the following typed message: ‘Volunteers required for special duties with the Long Range Desert Group. Details from the orderly room clerk.’

The two wiry young Royal Artillery gunners, who had long been in search of wartime adventure, looked at each other and smiled.

Almost from the moment of their call-up, a year earlier in May 1940 in the wake of the British Expeditionary Force’s calamity in France, Jimmy, who was born in east London, and Bill, a proud Cornishman of Scottish descent, had been seeking an escape from the drudgery which typified the life of the private soldier during the early war years.

On that early summer’s day within the vast training camp on the outskirts of Cairo, both men thought their prayers had been answered as they joined a growing queue of volunteers who were being assessed for their suitability for ‘special operations’ by Lieutenant Paul Eitzen, a young, diminutive South African who spoke with the clipped, confident tones of a public school boy. Eitzen, a member of the Royal Artillery attached to the Long Range Desert Group, wanted suitable volunteers to boost numbers of a covert unit which had begun experimenting with a 25lb artillery field gun while on operations behind enemy lines.

‘Eitzen was very pleasant to both of us,’ recalled Jimmy, 70 years later. ‘He asked us a few questions, made a quick assessment of our intelligence and our suitability to operate in small groups. He must have been satisfied with Bill and myself because we learnt within a day or so that we were in, or at least attached to, the LRDG. It was probably the easiest interview of my life. I think he sensed our suitability very quickly. We were two young, impressionable men, happy to try anything and full of initiative, and that is what Eitzen was after.’

A few days later Jimmy, Bill and Lieutenant Eitzen left Al Maza in a 15cwt Ford truck, one of several in an LRDG replenishment convoy, and began the long, arduous journey across the scorching desert to the group’s main base at the Siwa Oasis, which was about 350 miles south-west of Cairo and just 30 miles from the Libyan border.

Despite the demands and dangers of undertaking such a mission, Jimmy and Bill were gripped by a sense of excitement which they had not previously experienced as soldiers in an army at war. As the convoy entered the Sahara, Jimmy was immediately struck by the colossal expanse of the North African desert.

‘I was 21 and had never left Britain. Now I was in the desert and the natural beauty was staggering. It was something you couldn’t possibly hope to imagine. I had read about the Sahara in books but to see it with one’s eyes was breathtaking.’

Back in 1941 the wider Army knew little about the LRDG, or any of the so-called ‘private armies’ emerging during the North African campaign. But gradually stories revealing their exploits began to seep out, often in the bars of Cairo, and for men with a sense of adventure the LRDG held a certain allure.

‘We knew precious little about the LRDG and we didn’t find out much more after the interview with Eitzen. But we knew it would be something different, and that would have to be better than our current situation. For the first time since being called up, I did feel a sense of excitement.’

* * *

Jimmy Patch was born in 1920 and attended the Aldersbrook Elementary School in Wanstead before winning a scholarship to the Wanstead County High School where he was educated until the age of 16. Although he possessed the intellectual ability to attend university, his father, who had served in the First World War and won the Military Cross, had other ideas. After being demobbed in 1919, Jimmy’s father was employed in the Ministry of Labour during the depression and, after seeing hundreds of men join the dole following the collapse of the economy, decided that his son would get a ‘nice steady job’.

‘I left school and joined the Post Office as a counter clerk. I worked there for three years, based in Loughton, Essex; then I passed a clerical exam and was transferred to London. It was a very comfortable existence; the hours were nine to four, and nine to twelve-thirty on Saturday.’

When war was declared in September 1939, Jimmy, like hundreds of thousands of young men of his generation, soon began to accept the inevitability of being called up to train, fight and possibly die in a war of national survival.

‘I was 19 at the outbreak of war. I didn’t volunteer to serve in the Army, I waited until I was called up, which happened in May 1940, at the time of Dunkirk. I was told that I would be going to the Royal Artillery and would be a signaller – there was no option. Basic training took place in Scarborough at the Royal Artillery Signals Training Regiment. Obviously the threat of invasion at the time was very real. With practically no training at all – we certainly hadn’t fired a rifle – we were marched up to Scarborough Castle dyke every evening and spent the night guarding England. We each had a rifle and 50 rounds of ammunition in a cardboard box. We were the only thing that stood between Britain and being invaded by Hitler.’

For Jimmy, life in the Army was everything he had feared. He found the discipline and the endless inspections tiresome beyond belief, although he did enjoy the signals training, which taught him how to use a Number 11 radio* and how to send messages by radio or light-flashes using Morse code.

‘I didn’t regard being called up as an adventure, I just looked upon it as something that was inevitably happening to me. I had to submit to the discipline of the Army, of course, which I found very tiresome. In fact at one stage in 1941 I volunteered to be transferred to the RAF, because volunteers were called for, but nothing happened.’

The training continued until the late spring of 1941, when both Jimmy and Bill learnt that they were to be sent to fight in the North African campaign. Both men were given embarkation leave, but Jimmy’s leave was extended by another week after his parents’ house was damaged during a German bombing raid. ‘It was pretty scary. The house was badly damaged, but no one was injured and I got an extra week’s leave before being sent up to Liverpool to board a troopship bound for the Middle East.’

The Mediterranean Sea was a war zone in 1941, and the only relatively safe way for ships to reach Cairo was to travel in convoys via the Cape of Good Hope and up the east coast of Africa. For Jimmy and hundreds of others aboard, it was a journey into the unknown from which many would never return.

‘We were packed cheek by jowl on the troopship. There were dozens of us in a huge dormitory, each with a hammock. It was impossible to sleep. The atmosphere was hot, fetid and noisy. Every night a group of us would collect our blankets and try and find a sheltered spot on the deck and sleep there, and we did it in all weathers.

‘We all soon settled into a routine. There was a bit of training and PT to do, but we also played a lot of housey-housey – now called bingo. The voyage seemed to take an age but it ended up being quite enjoyable. We steamed almost to the other side of the Atlantic before heading back to the West African coast and pulling into Sierra Leone to refuel. Then we travelled down to Durban, where we transferred to another ship, the New Mauritania. In a convoy of three ships we moved up the east coast of Africa, into the Red Sea and on into the Suez Canal and Port Tufic.’

The LRDG was the creation of Major Ralph Bagnold of the Royal Signals, a man regarded by many within the new world of special forces as a genius. In the late 1920s and 30s, Bagnold, together with a collection of friends such as Bill Kennedy Shaw, Guy Prendergast and Rupert Harding-Newman, spent a great deal of time exploring the region of desert between the Mediterranean and Sudan. During those years Bagnold designed and perfected expeditionary equipment which would later be used by the LRDG. He created a simple sun compass to make navigation easier, perfected the condenser to conserve water in car radiators, thought up the idea of sand mats to help extricate vehicles stuck in soft sand, and developed properly balanced rations when travelling in such austere conditions.

Bagnold originally came up with the idea for the LRDG in November 1939, but it wasn’t until Italy entered the war, in June 1940, that his proposals were taken seriously and approved by the Middle East commander-in-chief, General Sir Archibald Wavell. Following a meeting between the two men, Wavell asked Bagnold if he could create an operational unit within six weeks.

Bagnold’s aim was to build a force capable of mechanised reconnaissance, intelligence gathering, navigation and mapping vast areas of the North African desert.

It was a massive undertaking but Bagnold set about achieving his mission with his customary zeal and over the next six weeks he recruited a force of New Zealanders who were regarded as both self-reliant and full of initiative and therefore perfect for working in enemy territory in small groups for weeks on end. While Bagnold began to select the men for his force, Harding-Newman, who had also been recruited into the unit, was given the responsibility of acquiring transportation.

The British Army in the Middle East in 1940 had no vehicles remotely suitable for desert warfare, and so Bagnold approached the Chevrolet company in Alexandria and acquired 14 vehicles, while Harding-Newman managed to obtain a further 19 from the Egyptian Army. The vehicles were quickly modified for the desert and long-range patrolling and repainted in camouflage colours.

The vehicles were fitted with a variety of weapons. These included the old Lewis machine-guns, which were initially fitted to 11 of the trucks and later replaced by the twin Vickers machine-gun, as well as four Boys anti-tank rifles and one 37mm Bofors anti-aircraft gun.

During those six weeks the men also had to be trained in desert navigation. This required detailed knowledge of how to calculate one’s location with sun compasses and theodolites, which use the position of the sun and the stars respectively.

Once all the men and equipment had been gathered, Bagnold took his force on two exercises into the desert to test their newly acquired skills and tactics. It was a tough ask, and many mistakes were made during that hectic period. Days were long and sleep was always welcomed. For some the demands of desert life proved too much, and they either asked to be returned to their units or were told their services were no longer required. Bagnold wanted to test his unit on every eventuality they might find in the desert, but their future success would depend above all on their ability to navigate and survive in one of the most hostile terrains on earth. Despite the huge challenges, however, by August 1940 the LRDG was operational.

* * *

Despite being accepted by the LRDG, Jimmy was only ‘attached’ to the unit; he would become a permanent member within a few months only if he proved his worth. In those early days the LRDG was composed of two squadrons, A and B. A Squadron consisted of four New Zealand patrols, while B Squadron was composed of two Yeomanry and two Rhodesian patrols, and two patrols from the British Brigade of Guards.

The composition of the patrols varied slightly according to the commander, but essentially they consisted of a variety of 15cwt and 30cwt Chevrolet trucks and, later on in the campaign, US jeeps. All the trucks were unarmoured and stripped down to their bare essentials. Having no doors or windshields, the vehicles offered little protection to the crews if they were attacked, but they were fast and manoeuvrable. The strength of the patrols also varied but was somewhere between 15 and 20 men. The vehicles were repaired, modified and improved after each mission. Every patrol had to be self-sustaining and contained a medic, navigator, mechanic, signaller and cook.

The Siwa Oasis base was close to the Libyan-Egyptian border and a world away from the regular Army. It was a long journey through the dust and the heat of the North African desert, but Jimmy and Bill were not bothered by the discomfort, and a week after leaving Al Maza the convoy arrived at the base.

Siwa was unlike any military establishment either Jimmy or Bill had previously experienced. The oasis was composed of a small village with a number of dwellings and an Arab hotel, used by some of the French forces who were also camped at the oasis.

Most of the LRDG troops chose to make their camp beneath the shade of a collection of lush date palms growing close to the numerous ponds which provided the Arab population and the military units with vital supplies of clean, fresh water. The oasis was also the perfect location for a forward operating base. It was in Egypt, 150 miles south of the coast, which was the main fighting area, and therefore relatively safe. But its presence was not secret, and the Italian forces certainly knew of its existence. Italian reconnaissance flights would fly over the oasis every week, and there was the occasional bombing run, but despite the threat the soldiers felt quite safe.

Discipline was different from the regular Army. Members of the LRDG were expected to be professional at all times; those who weren’t were sent back to their original units. It was, Jimmy thought at the time, like a breath of fresh air. There was hardly any saluting, no drill, no inspections. All patrol commanders were called ‘Skipper’, while all other ranks were on first-name terms.

The two new arrivals quickly settled into the relaxed atmosphere of desert life, and it hardly seemed that a violent war was raging across North Africa and much of Europe. In fact, life was so idyllic at Siwa that the troops called it ‘Hollywood’. Within the privations of desert warfare, the LRDG at Siwa wanted for nothing – there was always a plentiful supply of fresh water, and rations were brought in by the unit’s Heavy Section on regular administration runs.

‘Life in Siwa was very comfortable and we were a tight-knit, self-contained unit,’ Jimmy recalled. ‘Everyone was very professional and got on with what they had to do. There was no shouting and no punishments – the only punishment was to be sent back to your unit, and no one wanted that. We even had a little pond where we could go for a swim and keep cool and wash.

‘We wore whatever we liked and, more often than not, it was a mishmash of uniforms. We soon learnt what was practical for the conditions and what wasn’t, and that’s how we operated.

‘We had army rations we cooked ourselves and we had a rum ration every night – some people didn’t have it so there was a little bit more for others. We received the rum in bulk but it was rationed out. There was one character, an ex-tank soldier in his 40s, who was older than the rest of us and he used to take damn near a mug full every night and would go to bed stupid. The only real threat was from aircraft, which would come over most days either to take pictures or sometimes drop a bomb from a height well out of range. Life was also made a little bit more comfortable because the LRDG was issued 50 per cent more rations than other units because we worked in small patrol groups.

‘The Sahara is a vast area; you can fit the entire sub-continent of India into it, and we had behind us all the experience Ralph Bagnold had gained from his various expeditions into the desert in the late 1920s and 30s.

‘Bagnold developed the sun compass, which was a beautifully accurate instrument and it would give navigators a precise fix of the patrol’s location providing they knew what they were doing. Behind enemy lines you could keep way away from the fighting line, which was around the coast, but the danger was always aircraft. There were occasions when the LRDG were attacked by friendly aircraft and men were killed because the aircraft couldn’t distinguish between friendly forces and the enemy. You can’t fire effectively at an aircraft if you are on the move in vehicles, but if you are stationary then you become an easy target, so it’s one or the other and you would choose what to do depending on the terrain.’

Speed in the desert depended on terrain and the vehicles being used. In areas where the terrain was particularly difficult the speed could fall to just 10mph, usually in rocky and hilly areas. But there were other areas, such as the Kalansho Seria, which were almost perfectly smooth, allowing convoys to travel at speeds of 60mph.

‘Normally the terrain would be hilly and strewn with rocks, and it was often impassable, making navigation difficult. Then there was the sand sea, comprised of vast sand dunes. We tried to avoid the dunes, but sometimes you couldn’t. The dunes were shaped by the wind; on the windward side the slope would be quite gradual and you could sail up them very easily, and then suddenly they would end in what amounted to a precipice. The gradual slope would stop and you would be confronted by an almost vertical drop the other side, which you couldn’t see if the sun was shining in your eyes. There were one or two nasty accidents.’

Jimmy’s first mission took place a few weeks after arriving at Siwa. The target was an Italian occupied fort called El Gtafia, about 25 miles south of Agedabia in an area 200 miles behind enemy lines. But as Jimmy was soon to learn, being located behind enemy lines was often much safer than being in front of them. It was the autumn of 1941 and, after the spectacular earlier success of the German Afrika Korps and their inspirational commander Erwin Rommel, the tide of the desert war was turning in favour of the Allied forces.

General Claude Auchinleck had replaced General Wavell as Commander-in-Chief Middle East theatre, and reinforcements in the form of a new Corps had arrived, which allowed the creation of the soon-to-be 8th Army.

‘We didn’t do a great deal of training prior to the first operation, because we were perfectly confident and trained in what we had to do. It was also quite an easy function to take the gun, a 25-pounder, out into the blue† and fire it. The gun was always ready for action. We made ourselves familiar with all of the equipment. There was a Number 11 wireless set and field telephones, and we just made sure that we had all the equipment we needed to do whatever was asked of us.’

Prior to departing, the vehicles were loaded with water, rations, food, radios, spare parts and ammunition. To cope with the loads, the trucks were fitted with reinforced springs, spares of which were also carried.

The convoy took around three days to reach its target. Progress was slow because of the 10-ton Mack truck which was needed to carry the 25lb artillery piece. When the patrol arrived at the target location, Jimmy and Paul Eitzen moved up to the top of a hill to get a better view of the fort, while at the same time laying a telephone cable back to the gun, so that the two observers could relay information back to the gun team.

‘The fort was like one of those from the film Beau Geste which the Italians were very fond of building. It was being used to cache supplies for enemy troops on the move. It was a sitting duck – there were no troops outside covering the vulnerable points. Paul Eitzen gave direction orders to the gun team and we banged away for a pre-arranged number of rounds and minutes and then ceased. The first round we fired was a dud; it hadn’t exploded and we later found it in the middle of the fort.

‘Once the firing had ceased, some of the Rhodesians from S Patrol who had accompanied us went forward and captured the fort, which wasn’t that difficult because after the first round the four Italians occupying the fort ran away, so the place was empty, but they were quickly captured. The structure hadn’t been badly damaged because the 25-pounder isn’t really a big gun.

‘Once the fort had been captured, we withdrew into the desert with the four prisoners while the Rhodesians headed towards the coast on another reconnaissance mission. We made camp and tried to relax and explain to the Italians, as best as we could given the language problem, that we were going to look after them and that they would come to no harm. They responded to our friendship but I have to say they were a pretty unimpressive bunch – I think they were probably quite happy to have been captured because it meant they were out of the war. In fact, later that night we got out the rum ration and had a bit of a party. They couldn’t speak English and we couldn’t speak Italian, but it was all very friendly.

‘After the Rhodesians came back from their reconnaissance patrol we started making our way back to Siwa, but on the way this dreadful 10-ton Mack truck kept getting stuck in the soft sand. It was very difficult to get it out, because it was too heavy for the sand trays – a device used to free vehicles stuck in soft sand. The vehicle also had brake problems, and the thing became such a nuisance that eventually the Rhodesian officer in command of the patrol lost his patience and said, “Leave it.” We took the gun off the back of the truck and towed it behind one of the patrol vehicles and abandoned the 10-tonner.’

The LRDG had a limited number of vehicles at that stage of the war, and the difficulties with transporting even a relatively small gun such as a 25-pounder across the desert were immense. When the patrol arrived back at Siwa the artillery unit was given an Italian lorry to transport the gun, but it proved fairly ineffective, and after Christmas the unit was disbanded. Most of the gunners who had been recruited for the specialist unit were sent back to their former regiments. Jimmy and Bill were desperate to remain with the LRDG, but unfortunately Bill was taken ill with pleurisy.

‘Bill was very ill. I don’t think any of us thought that he was going to make it, and at one point his grave was dug; that was how close he was to death. Bill spent all his time back in the MO’s truck, and the only thing which saved him was one of the new sulphur drugs. When he was cured, he went back to the LRDG but joined one of the New Zealand patrols as a signalman and stayed with them until the end of the desert campaign.

‘Captain David Lloyd Owen, the skipper of the Yeomanry, or Y Patrol, asked me if I would like to join his patrol and I jumped at it. I became a Lewis gunner initially, but some time later the patrol navigator was selected for a commission and I began training to take his place, first as assistant navigator and then doing the full role.

‘The main role of the LRDG was doing reconnaissance and “road watch”. This involved monitoring the movements of enemy forces along the main coast road in the Benghazi area. The patrol would position itself a couple of miles from the road, camouflage up, and each evening two men would walk up to the road to a hide, rather like a birdwatching hide. They would sit there for 24 hours, making a note of everything which went past. All of this intelligence would be passed back up the chain of command to the staff officers at General Headquarters to help formulate future offensives or withdrawals.

‘Apart from the enemy, one of the other great challenges of desert warfare is coping with the heat. In the summer the temperature often reached 120°F, while dropping to below zero at night. In the winter the weather could be miserable.

‘The stripped-down vehicles kept the soldiers cool on long patrols and the men quickly acclimatised to the heat. To cope with the heat we dressed accordingly and often wore sandals – which were given to us as a special issue – instead of boots. We found that the standard issue baggy shorts were much more comfortable than long trousers, too. We were issued with these Arab headdresses which we folded into a triangle and fixed with a ring of black material known as an egal. These were meant to protect our heads but I didn’t often wear one. I personally wore a cap comforter, a woollen thing which folded up into a cap. In the winter we wore full-length sheepskin coats, woolly hats, gloves and a thick jumper to keep out the cold.

‘We’d have a variety of devices to keep ourselves warm. We would take an Italian water bottle, which was quite a capacious thing made of aluminium, fill it with water and break up a bar of chocolate into it and hang it over the exhaust and within five miles we would have a hot drink. We each had a blanket roll, no beds or sleeping bags, and we would just unroll that by the wheel of the truck. We had a rum ration every evening and some lime powder. We would mix the rum and lime with water and when we woke up we would have a nice cold drink.’

The LRDG continued with their reconnaissance operations and before long Jimmy was established as Lloyd Owen’s personal navigator. It was at this stage that rumours began to surface about a large raid involving many different units – a major departure from the type of operations usually conducted by the LRDG.

It was widely believed that Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, known as the Desert Fox, and the commander of the Axis forces in North Africa, was planning a major offensive eastwards along the coast.

One of those working on the British plan was Colonel John ‘Shan’ Hackett, who would later command the 4th Parachute Brigade at Arnhem. In essence the plan would involve members of the LRDG, the SAS, Army Commandos, Royal Marines, Popski’s Private Army,‡ the RAF and the Royal Navy launching simultaneous attacks on the Libyan coastal city of Benghazi, where a large German garrison was based, Tobruk and Barce. Once these attacks had succeeded, the Sudanese Defence Force were to attack the Jalo Oasis. If everything went to plan, Rommel’s bold aggressive thrust to move east and destroy the 8th Army would lie in tatters.

But the plan quickly became over-ambitious and too complex. In simple terms, the plan was as follows: at Tobruk, Lieutenant-Colonel John Haselden,§ a highly decorated British officer, would lead a force composed of around 80 commandos, engineers and Royal Artillery gunners, who were to capture the harbour and facilitate the landing of reinforcements by sea. Those reinforcements would then destroy underground fuel stores, release British POWs being held in the area and attack two airfields close to the city.

Meanwhile the SAS, supported by two Rhodesian LRDG patrols, would attack the harbour at Benghazi, destroying shipping and fuel storage tanks.

The raid on the Barce airfield was to be conducted by the LRDG, who would also be supported by the commander of Popski’s Private Army, Lieutenant-Colonel Vladimir Peniakoff.

Four days later the Sudanese Defence Force were to secure Jalo, which would then be used by David Stirling for further desert operations. D-Day for the operation was 13 September 1942.

But with so many staff officers now involved in the operation, security became a major concern. Gossip and rumours were rife in both Alexandria and Cairo, with some senior officers chatting openly about the operation over a gin and tonic in many of the bars and clubs which played host to the Allies.

In David Lloyd Owen’s excellent memoir Providence Their Guide: The Long Range Desert Group, 1940–45, the author recalls his fears for the success of the operation because of the loose talk in the bars and cafés of Cairo.

‘Even before I had first been put in the know by John Haselden in Cairo I had heard rumours; and I had heard these through gossip at parties and in the bars of Cairo. I was very suspicious that security had been blown, and I told John Haselden of my fears when he arrived in Kufra the day before we were due to set off on the 800-mile journey to Tobruk.

‘There was little that John, or indeed myself, could do at that stage except to tell all those involved with us what was planned, in order to scotch all the rumours that were current. This did not help, however, to allay our fears that we would be walking into a trap.’

Despite the bond of trust which existed amongst and between members of the LRDG, Lloyd Owen refused to brief his troops on the operation until just a few hours before D-Day. The soldiers knew that something was afoot, but they also understood that surprise, and therefore secrecy, was vital if any behind-the-lines raid was to succeed. On 24 August the five vehicles and 20 men of Y Patrol left the Fayoum, 80 miles south of Cairo, for the first stage of the operation.

‘We set out from the LRDG base at Fayoum and drove down to Asyut. We spent one night in a house which belonged to John Haselden. It was very comfortable, with a swimming pool and nice gardens. At that time we didn’t really have any idea what the target was. We had heard the rumours, of course, and we knew something big was going to come off.

‘At Asyut we met up with Haselden’s force of commandos. There were about 80 of them in seven 3-ton trucks, together with some sappers and gunners. We didn’t know it at the time, but the ruse was that the commandos were supposed to be POWs and their German guards were actually German Jews from the Special Interrogation Group (SIG). A great deal of planning had gone into making this work. The guards had proper German uniforms, faked papers, faked letters from girlfriends, and of course they spoke perfect German. Although the 3-tonners were British, they were painted with Afrika Korps markings. It was common practice at the time for both sides to use captured vehicles, so their presence should not have aroused suspicion.

‘After we picked up the commandos, we travelled across the desert to Kufra. It was a four-day trip, made slower by seven lumbering 3-tonners which kept getting stuck in soft sand. By now we had covered around 1,000 miles when the desert heat was at its most fierce.

‘We didn’t know any detail, we didn’t know where we were going. We just knew that something was coming off. We were to escort the commandos to the scene of the action, and that was to be done via Kufra.’

On 31 August Y Patrol and the commandos arrived at Kufra, the staging post for the combined operation, and the next six days were spent preparing for the mission. It was a relaxed yet busy period, and the troops quickly made themselves at home amongst the date palms which dotted the oasis.

As days passed, more men from other units began to arrive at Kufra, and rumours again began to surface. Haselden flew into the base on 5 September, and Lloyd Owen convinced him that the time had come to brief everyone on the mission.

Jimmy continued: ‘We were eventually briefed the night before we left Kufra, and it was a great relief. D-Day was 13 September and everyone was very relieved that it didn’t fall on a Friday.

‘John Haselden briefed us on the operation on the night before we were due to leave Kufra. He unfurled a map and explained in detail what we were going to do. Everyone was very enthusiastic, there were no morbid thoughts, and we were all utterly convinced that the mission would be a total success.

‘Our job was to deliver the commandos to Tobruk, secure the perimeter, then, at a given signal, move into the town and attack a radar station and then finally free some British POWs who were being held there. The idea was that the commandos would run amok, destroying as much as possible before being evacuated by sea.

‘The thing I was most concerned with was making sure that I had the right maps. I would be navigating, so that was obviously on my mind. It was another six-day trip but although it was routine for the LRDG it would have been pretty tough for the commandos, who weren’t use to these long-range desert patrols.

‘At one stage we had to find our way between the oasis of Jalo, which was occupied at the time, and the Sand Sea. So we had to steer a very accurate passage through a narrow corridor and we couldn’t show any light and had to be careful about noise.’

One of the main risks was being spotted by enemy aircraft and so some of the movement was conducted at night. The pace was slow and comfortable and the convoy arrived at Hatiet Etla on 10 September, where the small force took cover amongst the scrub and sand dunes. Y Patrol was now just 90 miles from Tobruk, and D-Day loomed ever closer.

‘You get to a stage where you just want to get on with things, and that was the case at Hatiet Etla. There was a lot of scrub in the area, which was ideal for camouflaging our vehicles, and we remained there for the next two days, completing our final preparations. The plan was rehearsed several times so that everyone knew what part to play and also what to do if things went wrong.

‘Everyone was making sure that their personal equipment was in perfect working order and that the vehicles were sound. It was that sort of thing, resting as much as possible and passing the time.’

The convoy moved off again on the morning of 13 September to an area called Ed Duda, 20 miles from the Tobruk perimeter. It was at this location that Haselden and his commandos went their separate way on what was ultimately to become a fatal mission. As the four 3-ton lorries containing the commandos departed, the men of the LRDG waved silently, many of them wondering what fate awaited their comrades.

As Haselden’s party moved off to the north, a small party of German troops were spotted and the two groups passed within two miles of each other. Rather than hide and risk being reported to German intelligence, Lloyd Owen decided to bluff it out and ordered Y Patrol to spread out and advance, hoping that the Germans would assume they were friendly forces given that they were 300 miles behind enemy lines.

‘We got right in amongst them before we opened fire. I think right up until that point they must have thought we were friendlies. We never gave them a chance, we just kept firing until all but one was dead and we captured him. It was kill or be killed. If we had let them go they would have reported us and we would probably have been bombed. That was the first time I had seen a dead body. It was the sort of thing you expect. If you are going to be involved in a war there are going to be dead bodies, but it didn’t affect me at all. I didn’t feel any sympathy, I didn’t feel any fear. I was detached. I had grown used to war.’

The captured prisoner then broke the news that everyone feared, revealing that he was one of many reinforcements who had been sent into Tobruk in recent days to prepare for a possible attack.

‘After that attack, we destroyed the enemy vehicles and moved off again briefly. Then we stopped, had a meal and waited to hear from the commandos. The idea was that Haselden would get in touch and brief us on the enemy situation so that we would be able to deal with any Germans on our route in. I think after about an hour we began to realise that something must have gone wrong. The radio operator kept trying to make contact but there was nothing. So after several hours we moved off down to the escarpment at Sidi Rezegh. Movement down the escarpment was painfully slow because it was so steep and covered in boulders.

‘We eventually reached the perimeter fence well after midnight and everyone knew the plan was already seriously behind schedule. By now we could hear the sounds of battle in the distance. The RAF had flown over some hours earlier dropping their massive pay-loads.

‘Lloyd Owen came over to me and said, “Patch, where do you think we are?” I pointed to the map and said “Here.” I was absolutely certain that we were within 100 yards of the perimeter. The message then came around that we were going to stay put until dawn and then go in and destroy our first target, which was the radar station. So the vehicles moved into cover and we waited.

‘I didn’t know it at the time, but the radio operator had spent most of the night trying to raise Haselden while we either rested or mounted sentries. By the morning the battle was still raging, but without any radio contact it was impossible to know what was going on.

‘Just before dawn Lloyd Owen called us all together and explained that he had been unable to contact Haselden or any of his commandos and that consequently we had no idea what was going on. The only option was to race back to the escarpment, set up the radio antennae and try and make contact with HQ to try and get an update on the situation.

‘Within 10 minutes we were on the move, racing past these huge German tented camps. Titch Cave, a belligerent character, who was the skipper’s gunner, wanted to open fire. He was manning a .50 calibre Vickers and he wanted to shoot up the camps as we drove past, but the Skipper said we just had to push on. It was quite an extraordinary sight. We could see all these German soldiers queuing for breakfast and we were racing past them. We could see them looking at us but no one tried to stop us.’

Y Patrol moved up and over the escarpment and continued for another 20 miles before halting and trying to reach HQ again, but it would take another seven hours before they eventually made contact and were given the dreadful news that the Tobruk element of the plan had been an abject failure. The large coastal guns which the commandos had been tasked with destroying had been moved, and the Royal Navy had suffered heavy casualties, losing two destroyers and a cruiser, and had also failed to land reinforcements. Y Patrol was ordered not to return to Tobruk but to make instead for Hatiet Etla and await further orders.

‘We moved off just as it was beginning to get dark. I had managed to get a few hours’ sleep but we were all pretty tired. But the worst feeling was knowing that the mission had been a failure. We still didn’t know what had happened, only that the raid had failed and casualties were heavy. It was a huge anti-climax and we all felt very dejected. When we arrived at Hatiet we had to wait a bit and then we were told to move to a place called Landing Ground 125, an emergency airstrip near Barce, about 80 miles from our location, near the Kalansho Sand Sea. The landing ground was to be used as a rallying point and we were told that there would be a lot of injured soldiers and men who had been separated from their units heading there.

‘I plotted a route and off we went. We left in the afternoon and arrived at LG125 when it was dark. LG125 was south of Barce, which was the scene of another raid which was exclusively LRDG, executed by New Zealanders and guardsmen, and that was quite a success. The LRDG destroyed a lot of aircraft, but they again ran into some resistance and had taken some casualties, and the theory was that the injured might have made their way to LG125.

‘We eventually found them later that night. There were about eight of them under a tarpaulin, being looked after by our medical officer, Richard Lawson, who had behaved admirably throughout the whole of the Barce raid. He had been dashing around treating men under fire and was awarded the Military Cross. Popski was also amongst the wounded – he had lost his little finger. We helped in whatever way we could, gave them cigarettes, water, food and some rum. A message was also sent back to our base requesting a transport aircraft to come and pick up the wounded. The next day an RAF Bombay arrived, flown by an officer called Flight Lieutenant John Coles, a professional airman, who later became an Air Marshal. It was a masterpiece of navigation on his part. He had flown across the desert, which was flat and featureless, but he managed to find this little strip with practically nothing on it except a few oil drums to mark it out as an airfield. We didn’t know precisely when he was coming and we didn’t have any pre-arranged signals. He had a couple of men with him, but by the time he landed this old Bombay had used up all of its petrol. But it was carrying petrol for its return journey in four-gallon jerrycans. So we all helped in the refuelling and the injured were loaded on board, and by the next morning they had all arrived safely in Cairo.’

After the RAF Bombay had departed, Y Patrol were ordered to remain at LG125 for the next 24 hours to await and assist those who had become separated from their respective units during the raid. By the time Y Patrol was ready to depart, on 20 September, they had been joined by another 60 stragglers.

‘We arrived back at Kufra on 25 September. I think we were all relieved to be back but also very angry about what had happened, because there was a very strong view that the failure could have been avoided if people had kept their mouths shut. It really was a case that careless talk costs lives.

‘By the time we got back to Kufra, other soldiers who had taken part in the other raids were already there and we soon began to swap stories. The general consensus was that we had all been let down by staff officers in Cairo, because of their loose talk and bad planning.’

A few days after arriving at Kufra, one of the most extraordinary events of Jimmy’s war took place during a German bombing raid. The Germans knew that Kufra was a British base and would occasionally attack. On this occasion, eight Junker 88s attacked the airfield where the RAF Bombays were located.

‘The bombing run took the Jerry aircraft right over the top of the date palms beneath which we [Y Patrol], the New Zealanders, G Patrol and the SAS were billeted. Our guns were still mounted on our vehicles and as they passed over us we all let rip. There were dozens of machine-guns firing up at them and we managed to shoot down six out of the eight aircraft. It so happened I was on some sort of errand on foot in another part of the oasis so I didn’t take part, I just heard this huge racket. Jerry made the mistake of assuming that we would be in the great fort built by the Italians, whereas that was the last thing we would think of doing, because it was such an obvious target. The 88s were easy targets because they were so low, just a couple of hundred feet, and so were difficult to miss – especially if you have several machine-guns all firing at the same time.

‘As they came over they were met by this barrage of machine-gun fire. I was desperate to get back and have a go, but things like that are over in a couple of minutes and I was too late. It was unheard of to shoot down six aircraft.

‘During the raid Lloyd Owen was wounded by a 20mm cannon shell which caught his back and arm. It was a very serious wound and I know that a lot of us thought he might not survive. But he eventually got back to Cairo and made a pretty good recovery.’

Over the following weeks the full catastrophe of the earlier mission began to unfold. It soon emerged that John Haselden had been killed leading an assault to capture the coastal guns. The commandos did achieve some initial success during the early stages of the operation but were overwhelmed by the size of the enemy force. Because the guns were not captured, the Royal Navy were unable to land the reinforcements who were supposed to bolster Haselden’s commandos, and the mission was doomed.

The SAS also faced fierce resistance at Benghazi and the Sudanese Defence Force did not fare well at Jalo either. Only the raid on the airfield at Barce could be described as a success, so overall, as an attempt to delay Rommel’s build-up for the offensive at El Alamein, the operation was a failure.

For Y Patrol the war seemed to be trundling along as they settled into a routine of road watch and long-range reconnaissance. Then planning began for a raid on the oasis at Hon, which at the time was occupied by the Italians.

‘We set off from Kufra and it was planned to be a two- or three-day trip. The journey was very routine and went without a hitch. The idea was to see what sort of garrison the Germans had there, beat it up, see how the enemy would respond and get as much intelligence as we could so we could plan future operations. It was like a fighting reconnaissance patrol. The skipper, who by that time was a chap called Captain Spicer, went forward in his jeep to check things out at the oasis, while we took cover amongst a rocky outcrop.

‘They went in and had a good look around, but they must have been spotted because some time later an Italian Caproni 309 Ghibli, a bomber, came over. We all opened fire at the aircraft and it veered away and that was the last we saw of it. But it was replaced by a number of CR42 biplanes. By now the Chevrolets had scattered and moved into defensive positions beneath a hill, with the sun behind us, so anyone attacking us would have to dive into the sun.

‘Then these damn planes started attacking us, but we opened up with these wonderful twin Vickers and that kept them away. When a plane is diving straight at you, it is pretty terrifying. I remember thinking, “I don’t want to be killed because of the effect it would have on my parents.” That was all I was thinking about; I wasn’t thinking about myself as such, just the grief it would cause my parents. It was a 50–50 chance that I would be killed. The bullets were coming in very close, and there was a sort of wop, wop sound as they hit the ground around me. As far as I was concerned, the pilot was trying to nail me. The sound of a round hitting the ground close to you is pretty terrifying, I can tell you, but the planes were put off by our shooting and they were unable to keep a direct course straight down to us. It was happening over and over, waves of planes attacking us. It was a very frightening incident indeed and that was about the closest I came to being killed, it was a pretty narrow squeak. If they had managed to get a bead on us for any length of time it would have been curtains, but to hit us they had to fly straight, and the pilots knew they were vulnerable when flying straight. The idea was to force them to twist and turn, which we did, and eventually they gave up and we hot-footed it back to Kufra.’

* * *

By May 1943 the whole of the North African coast was under Allied control. The LRDG had developed into a force of great renown. The challenge was to decide how the organisation should be used in the future and in what theatre.

One evening in late May, as the members of Y Patrol relaxed, the news came through that the LRDG were to be retrained for missions in Albania, Greece, Yugoslavia and Northern Italy.

The top brass had decided that there was no better force in the British Army than the LRDG to help train, equip and organise the various partisan groups fighting the Germans and Italians. But it would be a totally different type of warfare from that which the organisation had experienced in the vastness of the Libyan desert, where there was always plenty of room to hide.

The LRDG’s mountain base was to be the Cedars Hotel in Lebanon, the British Army’s Mountain Warfare Training Centre. The plan, for these one-time desert warriors, was to learn how to ski, climb and navigate in the mountains. For Jimmy and his colleagues it was an opportunity to recover from the months of arduous desert living, and although the training was going to be tough, the change, in many respects, was as good as a rest.

‘It was quite different to anything we had done before and a lot of fun although the training was extremely hard. The officers lived in the hotel and we were billeted in large Indian tents and it was all quite comfortable. The officer in charge of the training school was a character called Jimmy Riddle. He was said to have been an Olympic skier, and I can well believe it having seen him perform. The instructor of our little group was a Czech, a private soldier. He took us in hand, but not very effectively as far as I was concerned because I was never any good at skiing. I was also set to learn Greek, at which I tried my best. As well as skiing, there were long hikes through the mountains, and we learnt how to live off dried rations. We also had to learn how to navigate and fight in this new environment which was obviously very different from the desert.

‘We remained at the Cedars until early September 1943, at which point we were told that we were going to be trained as parachutists. Again, everyone thought this was great fun. But first of all we needed to have a colour-blindness test because when it came to jumping out of aeroplanes we needed to be able to see the difference between red and green lights. We were all lined up ready to do this test at the medical officer’s office, but all he had to test us with was the coloured cover of a magazine.

‘He pointed to different colours and you had to say what they were. I was colour blind so I obviously got it wrong, but it didn’t seem to matter – the medical officer said something like “Oh my God, you’ll have to follow the man in front.” That was my colour-blindness test.’

The Parachute Training Course took place at the Ramit David Airfield, close to Tel Aviv in what was then Palestine, now Israel. The soldiers were put through their paces and were taught how to fall and roll, a skill which would come in handy later when Jimmy had to make a quick exit – from a moving train!

‘The training had to be quite relentless, and so the powers that be decided that we should be allowed an afternoon off before our first jump, which was supposed to take place the following morning. Free time was quite rare, so a group of us went into Tel Aviv for a few drinks and a bit of sightseeing. By the time we got back to camp that night there was a panic going on and we were told to grab our kit and be ready to leave for an unspecified location.

‘We got our kit together, just what we could get into a little pack on our backs – a change of underclothes, socks, that sort of thing – together with our rifles, or whatever your weapon was, and we were taken down to Haifa harbour and were put on a Greek sloop bound for the Dodecanese Islands. It was quite clear that something big was going on because it was absolutely chaotic and no one seemed to have the slightest idea what we were doing or where we were going. One minute we had been enjoying ourselves looking forward to our first jump, and the next we were caught up in the whirlwind of confusion.’

On the evening of 13 September 1943 B Squadron of the LRDG, now commanded by David Lloyd Owen, who had recovered from the injuries he had sustained at Kufra, arrived at the Greek island of Kastelorizo. The Italian Armistice had just been signed, and Army headquarters in Cairo decided to send small garrisons of British troops to various Greek islands to try and encourage those Italian troops still based in the region to thwart any attempt by the Germans to seize them.

‘We were greeted with great enthusiasm by the Greek inhabitants, but I was completely overcome by the poverty on the island. The Italians had kept the locals very poor, and I remember this one poor lady with a baby and the child was just skeletal. It was quite shocking and I think we all had a very low opinion of the Italians after witnessing that. But we did what we could for the locals, who were very appreciative, and in those first few days we became aware of the beauty of our surroundings. The islands were idyllic and we had a chance of swimming in this beautiful clear water every morning and you could almost forget that there was a war on.’

Within a matter of days of arriving, the squadron was ordered to move with all possible speed to the island of Leros. The island was important to whoever was going to control the Aegean Sea because of its strategic position and its natural harbour.

‘We had hardly arrived at Leros when we were again ordered to move to an equally small island called Kalymnos. That was when the air raids on Kos began. The Germans were after a squadron of Hurricane aircraft, manned mainly by South Africans. We would watch these air battles taking place, with the Germans flying in from their base on Rhodes, and one by one the Hurricanes were shot out of the sky. The air battle lasted about a month or so – it was a terrible sight, and by then we realised that this whole operation was a complete mess.

‘Then we woke up one morning to find that the strip of water between Kalymnos and Kos was full of enemy shipping and the Germans were invading Kos. We anticipated that we were going to be next, so it was decided to move back to Leros to concentrate our forces. We stowed all our gear on to a schooner and sailed from Kalymnos to Leros, which was no more than a mile or two so didn’t take too long, but while we were unloading our gear we were attacked by Stukas. I don’t know if the Germans were just lucky or whether they had a reconnaissance unit on the island, but we were sitting ducks and an easy target.

‘All we had to hit back at them was our rifles and a few Bren guns. It was terrifying. I was behind this sort of low wall firing at the Stukas with my rifle as they dive-bombed.

‘One of our chaps, “Pusher” Wheeldon, was killed in the bombing. He was in his early 20s and came from Chesterfield – a very fit, active chap who would have a go at anything. As the bombing was going on, he jumped back on board our boat and grabbed a Bren gun and set it up on a tripod on the quay so he could shoot at the planes. But he was completely in the open. Bombs were exploding everywhere and he was caught by the shock wave of a blast, which severely damaged his lungs. His face and chest were covered in red frothy blood – he was lying on his back coughing up his lungs, a dreadful sight. He was clearly on his way out, his lungs had been destroyed. The medics came and took him away in a jeep and I think he died about an hour later.’

Once the Stukas departed, the troops began to count the cost of the attack. Many soldiers had been killed and injured, some with appalling wounds. But the casualties amongst the LRDG were remarkably light.

‘There was a row of bodies along a wall near where I had been shooting during the attack. The bodies were all in a line and had been blown there by the force of the blast. I noticed a chap moving along the row and checking for pulses. I don’t know if he was the medical officer or a medical orderly. I saw him pick up the hand of one poor soul and I said, “It’s no good checking his pulse, he hasn’t got a head.” It was carnage, and I think largely brought about by the confusion of that operation.’

On 23 October 1943 the LRDG were ordered to carry out a raid on the nearby island of Levita, which was believed to be in the hands of escaped German POWs. The mission was to typify the lack of intelligence which ultimately condemned the entire operation.

‘We went over to Levita on these Royal Navy motor launches. Y Patrol and some Rhodesians went to the south-west of the island and a New Zealand patrol went to the north-west. We made for a meteorological complex, which we thought might be occupied, and prepared for a bit of a firefight. The building was empty so we moved into the area quite easily. We began digging slit trenches and preparing the defensive position, which was just as well because we soon learnt that rather than just a few POWs there was a strong force of German mountain troops just a few hundred yards away across the valley and they must have spotted us pretty quickly because we were soon under attack.

‘Fortunately, by the time the enemy attacked most of us were in cover. I was in a slit trench firing across the valley when suddenly the Germans started using a mortar. The first round overshot and the next one landed in front of the trench. I thought, “Oh Lord, the next one’s going to come in between.” I could hear it coming in and it landed on the parapet of my trench but didn’t go off – it was about a foot away from my head. Had it gone off I would have been cut in half.’

The battle raged for several hours and it was also clear to Jimmy and his patrol members that bitter fighting was taking place on the other side of the small island.

‘Our force was commanded by John Olivey, a Rhodesian who had already won the MC and was regarded as a very competent officer. Later that morning he sent a party to see what could be done about having a go at the Germans but they returned soon after with a wounded man and had made little impact. Then it was my turn. John Olivey turned to me and three others and told us to go and have a look and try and get an assessment of the enemy positions and strengths. So off we set, knowing that it was going to be pretty dangerous, but also convinced it was the right course of action.

‘In our team we had one Bren gun and the rest had rifles. I was a lance-bombardier at this stage – it was only acting rank, but it meant that I was in charge. So we moved off and I decided to detour off a little and try and reach the Germans’ flank. We were moving across open ground when a German flying-boat armed with machine-guns appeared and it was quite obvious that the aircraft had spotted us. The aircraft was flying over the top of us, mainly so that we kept our heads down. I couldn’t move forward any further, so I decided to go back to the meteorological station and had just got within sight of the buildings when I saw a lot of people moving around. I obviously thought they were our chaps, but in fact Jerry had captured the meteorological station. I didn’t know that at the time.

‘We were just casually walking over this stretch of open ground, making our way back, when a German machine-gun team suddenly appeared. It would have been damn silly to try and do anything – they would have cut us to ribbons – so we just had to give up.

‘I was absolutely furious because I thought, “That’s it. War over.” We didn’t put our hands up, we thought that would be undignified. This one Jerry who they sent out to round us up indicated that we should put our rifles on our shoulders. We didn’t even do that. We just carried the rifles in our hands and just walked up to where the Germans were and threw our weapons on to a dump. That was that, we were POWs. The rest of the men at the meteorological station had all given up – they must have given up pretty easily, because by the time we arrived they were being marched down to where the Germans had set up their HQ. The whole lot of us had been captured. Meanwhile the New Zealanders on the other side of the island were having a tremendous battle, so much so that they eventually ran out of ammo and they had to give up too. My friend Ron Hill was with them and he was also captured.

‘The overriding sensation after being captured was one of disappointment and anger, but it was quite difficult to analyse one’s feelings. You are in a situation and you have to make the best of it. The full force of being a POW hadn’t hit me by then.’

Jimmy, Ron Hill and the other members of Y Patrol were all marched to the harbour at Levita. There they learnt that they were to be flown by seaplane to Piraeus, then taken to a German prison camp.

After arriving in Athens, the POWs were taken to an old Italian barracks where they were held for several days and questioned by two English-speaking German officers who wanted to discover whether any of the captured British were willing to change sides and fight with the Germans.

‘The officers were very polite, very decent. My attitude was: what the devil are you on about? You can’t possibly win this war. The Russians were well on the go, the US were in the war, Germany was being bombed to hell and it was quite clear what the outcome was going to be eventually. I didn’t say that to them directly, I just implied it, but they wouldn’t have any of it and they wanted us to switch sides and join them. “Germans and British are far too close to be enemies,” they said. Our races were so similar that it was ridiculous that we were fighting one another. That was their attitude. They wanted us to fight against the Russians. Their argument was based on the grounds that the Jews were running our side in the war and that everything could be blamed on the Jews. Our attitude was “Don’t be so bloody silly.”’

By the time the POWs arrived in Athens, Ron Hill and Jimmy were determined to make their escape. Other members of the LRDG had managed to slip past the German guards while being marched through Athens.

‘I, for one, was absolutely up for escaping, especially after a few days in the compound, which I soon became pretty fed up with. Right from the start, Ron and I said we were going to escape. But not before we had some fun with the guards. They were funny little gnome-like men from the Black Forest and they were armed with the most ancient of rifles, great long things which were as tall as they were.

‘We used to make fun of them unmercifully. We would start a bit of a rumpus at one side of the compound and these poor little blokes would start shouting to one another and rush round to one side of the compound where the noise was. Then we would start a similar thing on the other side so they would have to rush back. And we’d sing funny songs to them. At the time, the Americans had a song which had rude noises in it which went like this: “When the Führer says we are the master race we heil, (raspberry noise), heil, (raspberry), right in the Führer’s face. Not to love the Führer is a great disgrace so we heil, (raspberry), heil , (raspberry), right in the Führer’s face.” And these blokes loved it, though they didn’t really understand what was going on.’

After a few days in Athens, rumours began circulating that the POWs were to be transported to Germany, and Jimmy and Ron knew that the opportunities for escape would soon be limited.

‘We were put into cattle trucks with one kilogram of sour black bread and two small tins of Italian bully beef for a four-day journey. There were about 30 of us in each truck, the toilet was a bucket and one poor soul had dysentery, so you can imagine what it was like. As the train went through the villages and towns we were able to plot the route on a silk escape map which was sewn into my beret as part of my escape kit – most people in the LRDG had one. I also had a hacksaw blade sewn into the flies of my trousers and a small button compass hidden in the collar of my battledress tunic. There was no excuse for not at least trying to escape. I had managed to avoid being searched and the Germans never found my escape kit.

‘Inside the trucks there were little openings in the four corners of the carriage which were criss-crossed with barbed wire, so I began sawing away at the barbed wire and then Ron and I took it in turns. The train frequently stopped and we were allowed out to go to the toilet, but we had to do our business in front of all these civilians who were passengers on the train and the whole thing was quite humiliating.

‘The night before we planned our escape two LRDG men on the other truck kicked out some panels and managed to escape but they were later recaptured. The Jerry commander was furious and lined us all up in the morning and was walking up and down, bellowing at us, making all sorts of threats.

‘By now the train had entered Macedonia, and that night, on 6 November 1943, just after we left the town of Veles, 13 days after we were captured, I managed to saw through the barbed wire. Ron and I tossed a coin to see who would get out first and I won. We bent the wire back and I climbed out and was hanging on to the side of the train as we passed through a tunnel, at which point I saw Ron’s boots appearing through the opening and so I jumped. The train was moving at about 25mph but my parachute training helped break my fall and I landed safely.

‘The rest of the train passed and when I saw the red light on the back of the train disappearing into the distance I must say I felt pretty lonely. I didn’t regret getting out at all, I was delighted to be free, but there I was in the middle of occupied Europe all by myself at that stage – Ron still hadn’t jumped out. His jump was delayed and he was quite a little way from me. I walked up the track and found him hiding behind a telegraph pole because he thought I was a guard from the tunnel. Every tunnel and bridge we passed was guarded – but this one wasn’t, fortunately. I spotted Ron and said something like, “Hello Ron, are you OK?” But he’d hurt his leg when he landed. He’d twisted a muscle in his thigh and had taken a couple of chips out of his lower leg when he hit the track.

‘Ron and I used to speak quite openly about escaping and the extraordinary thing was that everyone in that truck could have got out, everyone, but they just didn’t. I think they were just resigned to the fact that they were POWs and that was how they were going to spend the rest of the war. I felt very disappointed that no one else attempted to escape.

‘Ron also had a map in his beret and he gave it to a couple of Scottish commandos who were with us in Y Patrol, but I don’t think they used it. I think it was the shock of capture, and a sort of inertia developed in some people, but not in me. I deeply resented that I was a prisoner and I wasn’t going to put up with it.

‘It was raining, dark and cold. All we had to eat was a few items from a Red Cross parcel we had been given and in front of us was a very long journey through the Macedonian mountains. I asked Ron if he could walk. He said yes, so off we went – into the mountains on a compass bearing – and that was how our escape began.

‘We figured that if we walked on a bearing slightly south of west we would eventually get to the Adriatic Sea, but that meant walking through the whole of Albania. The plan was to get to the Adriatic, steal a boat, row across the Adriatic and get to Italy, which was where the action was. What we wanted was to get back into the war.

‘We didn’t know what Albania was like but we soon found out that the country was really quite mountainous and swarming with enemy soldiers. We didn’t know what to expect so we started off walking at night so that we wouldn’t be spotted by the Germans, but poor old Ron’s leg was getting worse all the time.

‘The going was very rough, steep wooded hills and valleys made all the worse at night. One night we were on an open hillside, very rocky and blowing a gale. There was freezing rain, more like sleet, and we took it in turns with the compass to go on the right bearing. It was my turn to lead and I turned round to see how far behind Ron was and he wasn’t there. I went back to see where he was and he was sitting on a rock. “Sorry, old son,” he said, “I can’t go any further.” I believed him because he was a tough little bloke – quite small was Ron, about five foot six, but very tough. He’d seen active service in the tank regiment before the LRDG and had been injured when his tank was destroyed, so he knew what it was all about.

‘I looked round for somewhere to spend the rest of the night, to see if I could find a dry spot. I found an area where there was an overhanging rock with a dry place underneath it, but with just room for one, so I installed Ron and I went to look for somewhere for myself, which I found but it wasn’t as comfortable. By then I was very, very tired and went to sleep in spite of the conditions. I woke up at first light, freezing cold, and I couldn’t move – I suppose I was close to hypothermia. I started moving my fingers and eventually got movement back in my body and went to find Ron and he was OK, he’d managed to recover a bit, and then off we went again.

‘On about the fifth day it was clear that Ron’s leg wasn’t getting any better – we had virtually no food and so there was nothing for it but to get some help. We decided to enter a village called Belica in western Macedonia. It was a risk, but we thought that the locals might help us. I have to say that by that stage we were at a pretty low ebb; we were cold, exhausted and malnourished, and we needed some food and shelter.

‘When we arrived in the village there were lots of locals filling water buckets from the stream, so we went over and filled our water bottles. I think it was obvious to them that we were soldiers, and they looked astonished to see us. We waved and smiled and walked off and were heading in the direction of some houses when this character appeared, waving his arms at us and making it quite clear that we couldn’t go any further and that it was dangerous.

‘Ron looked up at this house and saw uniformed men walking about, and they must have been Bulgar soldiers. We took this individual at his word and left the road, pushed up into the hills as fast as we could and disappeared. Fortunately no one fired at us or followed us. We went on walking for the rest of the day and came to a river flowing roughly in the direction we wanted to go, so we continued to walk beside it along a towpath. We walked on until it started getting dark. Ron’s leg was getting no better so we continued until we came across this very primitive hut, which appeared to be occupied.

‘We approached the hut cautiously and using sign language we tried to make it clear to the people inside who we were and how we had jumped off the train. But it was also clear that they didn’t want us there. After a few minutes they got up and beckoned us to come with them; they led us outside and pointed up to a hill and just kept pointing. They wanted us to push off up the hill, so off we went, feeling very dejected. But after a few hundred yards it became apparent that the path wasn’t going anywhere, so we thought bugger this and went back to the hut, and when we banged on the door for a second time the two men seemed to have had a change of heart and invited us in.

‘It was the most primitive human habitation you could imagine. It had an earth floor, with a fire burning in the middle. The smoke rose up through the thatch – it was medieval.

‘There was a cooking pot hanging by a chain from one of the roof timbers, with some water boiling in it, and that seemed to be the sole means of cooking and heating. The dwelling itself was divided by a wall and on the other side were cattle. The only furniture was a couple of little three-legged stools, wonderful things cut out of the trunk of a fir tree at a place where there were three side branches, so that you could stand it up.

‘There were no cupboards, tables or chairs. Just these two men, who I think must have been father and son. It was all very odd, but we were so tired and hungry that to us it seemed like the lap of luxury. I think they took pity on us, and they invited us to a meal which consisted of what we later discovered was called katchemak – at least that’s what we called it. The stew consisted mainly of maize flour dumped into the pot by the handful until it had piled up into a pyramid shape. The mixture was stirred until it took on the consistency of a thick porridge, and at some stage meat – mutton or pork or anything available really – would be added, and we would pick at it with our fingers. It tasted fine that night because we were so hungry and relieved that we would be spending the night somewhere dry and warm. After the food was finished they invited us to lie down by the fire and sleep, which we did with consummate ease.

‘At some stage during the night some sort of official arrived at the hut, with a rifle slung over his shoulder, shouting, “Documenti, documenti!” Word must have circulated that there were two strangers in the area.

‘We showed him our pay books, which was all we had. He looked through them but clearly couldn’t find what he was looking for. He produced a Bulgarian banknote, and along the bottom it said “Thomas de la Rue, Angleterre”, which was clearly the printers’ name, and Angleterre was the word he was looking for.

‘It then clicked that he wanted us to produce something showing Angleterre, but we had nothing. He must have trusted our word, because in the end he made a series of gestures which showed us that he was satisfied.’

Just after dawn Jimmy and Ron left the hut with their new friends, walked along the river they had followed the previous day, up through a deserted village and into a large cave which was occupied by Chetniks.¶

The commander of the group of 30 guerrilla fighters was a Serb regular Army colonel called Stoyan Markovic. Markovic had learnt English from a book and was able to make himself understood to the two British soldiers. He explained to Jimmy and Ron that they were welcome to stay, and said he hoped that they would be prepared to join his band of fighters.