We arrived at camp in no man’s land...
IN the second of three extracts from The Go Boys, by World War Two veteran Harry Killingbeck, from Rising Bridge, the 8th Army troops have recently arrived in Egypt in the summer of 1942, in the months leading up to the second Alamein:
Battle of
El
Eventually we arrived at a tented camp in no man’s land (not that anybody would want it!) near a place called Tahag, not far from Isma’iliya. What a place! Just sand and dirt with temperatures in the nineties. We were dressed in shirts and shorts which were soaked in sweat in minutes. Our first meal was a joke: it was bully beef stew with watermelon - the same kind that the R.T.O. had thrown off the train.
Here we learned our first lesson in the desert way of life, a knife and fork would never be needed. One could only use a spoon because the other hand was needed to fan away the hundreds and hundreds of flies that wanted to share your food. The following few days were torment as almost ninety nine percent of the regiment was ill with what is known as ‘Gippy Tummy’. There wasn’t much point in going to the medical officer because of the length of the queue, so most of the time was spent in the other queue - that for the toilet, which consisted of a big hole four yards long covered with a wooded platform into which four or five square holes had been cut. These holes each had a lid over which one squatted French style. After a couple more days most of us seemed to be back to normal.
The toilet attendants were Arabs who came every morning to put sand in the hole to which they added a mixture of petrol and oil and then threw in a lit piece of paper. It was at times like this that you could get a burnt bum! If you went to answer the call of nature, lifted one of the lids and squatted down it was O.K. However, if someone else came in and lifted another lid then all the heat and flames came to you - many times we had a joke on some poor b**ger.
The next thing we did was to make the most important part of our desert equipment and that was the sun compass. This was a kind of mobile sundial consisting of several aluminium plates each with longitude and latitude, plus a time scale from 6am to 6pm. On each circular plate were marked all the points of the compass and a hole drilled in the centre.
It depended on what type of vehicle it was attached to because many of our tractors had canvas covering which meant that the compass had to be placed on the bonnet, while on the troop 15 hundredweight truck there was an opening on the fixed roof where the antiaircraft Bren gun could be mounted, so the sun compass was attached there. By using a back bearing, one could find one’s way over almost trackless desert depending where the sun cast its shadow on to the plate.
This method had several disadvantages, the main one being that it couldn’t be used at night or if it was obliterated by a dust or sandstorm, and at such times we would use a handheld prismatic compass. These too had their drawbacks as the electric fields from the vehicle’s engine did affect and alter them.
The method adopted was for the navigator to walk a few yards in front of the vehicle, take a bearing on some point on the horizon, if indeed one could be seen, work out the position on the map, hope for the best and head off in that direction. I was once in trouble with Major Bardsley: he said I was two hundred yards short, at night, on a trip of some forty miles. “We would have been firing on our own troops if this had been the old Field Artillery Battery,” he said. But we still used both types of compass all through the desert campaign. However, once again I’ve gone off at a tangent so back to the tale!
THE concluding excerpt will be in next week’s paper. To pick up a copy of the memoirs, visit Amazon and search for ‘The Go Boys by
Harry Killingbeck’.