On the Shores of the Mediterranean (40 page)

By now I was beginning to wonder when, if ever, we would reach Bir Hakim.

Just at this moment the vehicle in front stopped and the guide came loping back to exchange a few words with Mr Keralla, the younger of the two brothers, who was driving our vehicle.

‘He says that we are now at the point where the main Gazala minefield curves round Bir Hakim to the south of it and then turns north. From here it is about a mile through the minefield to the southern entrance. We are now going to leave this track and from now on for some way there is only one very narrow track through the minefield and he has told me that I must follow in his wheelmarks exactly as there are mines on either side.’ At this a certain feeling of tension made itself felt in our vehicle as we turned off the main track and followed the other one into what appeared to be trackless, virgin desert. There were no more camels on the horizon, no more goats, no more sheep, no more Beduin, nothing but little bands of wagtails who were strutting about on the main Allied minefield, now on our right and left, with what can only be described as contempt. All very well for them – lightweights.

‘I say,’ Wanda asked Mr Jedalla, something I had wanted to do myself ever since leaving the track, but hadn’t the courage. ‘Do you think this is safe?’ (I would also have liked to have asked his brother if he would mind slowing down a bit and leaving a slightly larger gap between our patrol car and the one in front, which might give us a slightly better chance of not going with it if it blew up.) But all Mr Jedalla said was something about us all being in the hands of Allah.

Then, having travelled about a mile, just as the guide said we would, and having gained a few feet in altitude, with the second minefield presumably to our left front now, we drove through some vestiges of what had been wire entanglements, through a gap in the remains of what had been a wall made of piled-up stones, to a place where there was the well, the Bir, from which
Hakim took its name, and the ruins of what was called the Ridotta Bir Hakim, a pre-war Italian desert fort. We were in Bir Hakim, and like all the other boxes in the Gazala Line it was a hell of a place to be stuck in. On 21 January 1942 Rommel had attacked the British and driven them back to this Gazala Line. The following months were spent by both sides in preparing to attack one another and by the Eighth Army in further strengthening the Gazala Line. The Line was forty miles long and up to fifteen miles deep. It consisted of a number of heavily fortified boxes largely manned by motorized infantry with artillery support. Behind this line the Allied armour was disposed. Of these fortified boxes the southernmost and perhaps the most heavily fortified was the one held by the Free French at Bir Hakim.

The main minefield was sixty miles long. It extended from the Gazala Inlet on the Mediterranean forty miles south to Bir Hakim, enclosing it on three sides and then extending another twenty miles northwards again. Although no mines were sown to the immediate north of Bir Hakim to allow the space between the eastern and western fields to be used as a sally port, the French had sowed an estimated 50,000 mines around the perimeter, creating what they called
marais de mines
, mine swamps in which the mines were only just over a yard apart. They didn’t bother about wire entanglements. There was no need. The only time they put down wire was to remind themselves where the mines were.

This vast fortification system in and behind the Gazala Line, which Rommel estimated to contain a million mines, nothing to the 200,000,000 he ordered to be put down in the Atlantic Wall in France when he was in charge of the defences in 1944, or the 400,000,000 he would have put down if the invasion had been postponed, gave even him the horrors, although he himself realized the inherent defect of such a defence system, which has the effect of limiting the offensive capabilities of whoever is occupying it.

‘This form of defence is extraordinarily impervious to artillery fire or air attack,’ he wrote subsequently, ‘since a direct hit can destroy at the most one slit trench at a time. An immense expenditure of ammunition is necessary to do any real damage to an enemy holding a position of this kind.’

At eight-thirty on the evening of 26 May 1942, Rommel ordered Operation Venezia to be set in train and together with a striking force comprising the 15th and 21st Panzer, the 90th Light Divisions, and two Italian armoured divisions, the Trieste and the Ariete, he set off to the south-east together with 10,000 vehicles in brilliant moonlight, an astonishing sight to those who witnessed it. His intention was to turn the southern flank of the Gazala Line, bring the British armour to battle and destroy it, and to take Bir Hakim.

Travelling through the night and raising great clouds of dust that made navigation extremely difficult, by dawn on the 27th this vast armada was twelve miles to the south of Bir Hakim, with the exception of the Trieste Division that had gone off course and got itself imbrangled in the minefield between the British 150 Brigade Box (the next box to the north of Bir Hakim) and the French position. By half past ten the 90th Light was at El Adem, some forty miles to the north-west, and subsequently the 15th and 21st Panzer Divisions became involved in the first of a series of tremendous armoured battles that were to continue for a fortnight behind the Gazala Line, and which on this first day caused the loss of one-third of the total Axis armour.

We sat with our backs against the wall of some unidentifiable ruin inside the perimeter of Bir Hakim, listening to the wind droning over it and eating the delicious picnic of cheese and the hard-boiled eggs, crisp French bread, dates and oranges that the two Beduin brothers had conjured up, and drinking the strong, orange-coloured tea laced with sweetened condensed milk of
which they must have learned the secret of making from some long-departed British soldier; the tea that every British soldier, including myself, firmly believed contained bromide to keep his mind concentrated on killing people and not fooling about with girls, and without which the entire British army and all the Dominion armies, and the war with them, would almost certainly have come to a standstill.

We were on the southern edge of a bare and, apart from the ruined fort, featureless plateau totally devoid of natural cover, that was scarcely a plateau at all in the accepted sense of the word but, nevertheless, because it was a few feet higher than the surrounding desert, gave whoever held it the advantage of being able to bring to bear a murderous fire on anyone who didn’t.

Forty years or so ago it had been a very skilfully planned system of combat positions – gun emplacements for French 75mm guns and Bofors guns, small pillboxes, machine-gun and anti-tank gun nests and lots of slit trenches, all small works but incredibly numerous; there were 1200 of them within the approximately ten-mile perimeter of the fortress.

Now they were mostly silted up and the whole area was littered with the debris of the Free French Brigade’s occupation of it: broken wine bottles (did they actually have wine at Bir Hakim coming up with the rations?), bits of leather equipment, very brittle after more than forty years, shells, exploded and unexploded, and lots of mines. From time to time, now that the wind had got up, all this unlovely material was hidden from view in clouds of dust.

The regiments that made up the First Free French Brigade that had been given the job of holding Bir Hakim under General Koenig were the Bataillon du Pacific, No. I, which was made up of natives from Tahiti and other French islands in the Pacific; the II
^e
Bataillon de la Légion étrangère (anti-tank), made up of various
nationalities, including Germans; the Bataillon de March No. II, which had been founded in the Congo and was made up of recruits from French Equatorial Africa; and two artillery regiments: the I
^er
Régiment d’Artillerie, which was armed with French 75mm guns, and the I
^er
Bataillon de Fusiliers-Marins. There was also an anti-aircraft regiment, an anti-tank company, engineers, signal, medical and administrative troops. Altogether the strength of the garrison was about 3600 men and one English girl, Susan Travers, who was General Koenig’s driver. The officers and NCOs were mostly French. The majority of the men were natives of the French Colonial Empire including their islands in Papua.

Here, at Bir Hakim, mines not only formed the perimeter. They were inside it, too. A few yards from where we were sitting sheltered from the wind, eating our picnic, a large crater marked the spot where two members of the Omar Mukta had recently lit a cooking fire on ground which had a mine planted in it and had blown themselves to pieces. Some were on the surface. Most of them had been rendered innocuous. Others, still active, could be seen half buried in the ground. The majority were still below the surface. Most of them were anti-tank mines designed to explode if a weight of 100 lbs or more was imposed on them but after forty years or so all the evidence seemed to be, according to the guide, that a lot of them would go off if you even looked at them. There were also a lot of anti-personnel mines, and the long trip wires which activated them were an additional hazard; they were to be found stretched all over the plateau.

On that May morning forty years ago, eighty tanks of the Ariete, the best Italian armoured division in the desert, had attacked the south-east perimeter here at Bir Hakim, the section held by the Foreign Legion with its anti-tank guns. They failed to take it, although they tried very hard, and they lost 32 of the tanks employed in the attack.

Then, in the course of the next fortnight, the German 90th Light Division, the Trieste Division, specially trained sappers, and combat groups of the Afrika Korps, supported by heavy artillery and the Luftwaffe, who made 1300 sorties against it using Stukas and JU87s and 88s, all tried to reduce it. During this battle Rommel issued three ultimatums calling on General Koenig to surrender. One he wrote in his own hand on a sheet of paper torn from a message pad; another was delivered by word of mouth by an Italian officer whom General Koenig either couldn’t or didn’t want to understand. The third was communicated to one of Koenig’s Légionnaires, who happened to be German, by a German officer who, when greeted distinctly coolly in his own tongue by an enemy compatriot, asked rather plaintively, ‘Doesn’t anyone here speak English?’

It was no good. The French had too much firepower, and they were too well dispersed behind too many mines. They were also very well supported by the Desert Air Force, who flew close on 1500 sorties in thirteen days, losing nineteen fighters in the process, and by the 7th Motor Brigade which brought in convoys of supplies and ammunition to them through the minefields.

Nevertheless, on 8 May 1942, after the fortress had been attacked by 45 JU87s, 3 JU88s and 10 ME 110s escorted by 54 singleengined fighters, the first of three similar attacks that day, and had been subjected to heavy shelling and repeated infantry attacks, the Germans succeeded in occupying an important French artillery observation post at the north-west corner.

On the 9th, using waves of infantry supported by more than 60 bombers and yet another special combat group, the Germans succeeded in getting within 220 yards of the Ridotta, and on the following day, the 10th, after a raid by 20 JU88s and 40 JU87s escorted by 50 ME 109s and 110s, in the course of which 130 tons of bombs were dropped, the same combat group, commanded
by a Colonel Baade, succeeded in the face of the most desperate resistance by the Negro Tirailleurs (Skirmishers) of the Bataillon de Marche d’Oubangui and by the gunners of the I
^er
Régiment, in breaking through the north-western perimeter and establishing itself within it. Late that night Rommel reported to Kesselring that he was confident that he would take Bir Hakim the following day.

Meanwhile, earnest entreaties to Churchill and others had been made by General de Gaulle, who was extremely loath to allow this
corps d’élite
to go into captivity, and that same day, the 10th, General Ritchie decided that Koenig and what remained of his garrison, about 2700 men – accounts differ – of the original 3600, including 200 wounded, should break out of the fortress that night, something which had not been allowed to 150 Infantry Brigade who, in their box north of Bir Hakim, had fought until overrun. This they did, under cover of darkness, from the southwest side against some opposition.

Five miles out, they were picked up by a large convoy of lorries and ambulances brought in by the British 7th Motor Brigade, which had many times throughout the siege brought in supplies of water and provisions for them through terrain infested with mines and enemy. General Koenig himself was driven out of the fortress by his English girl driver, who had remained in it throughout the battle. The next morning, by which time it no longer had any importance to them, the Germans occupied Bir Hakim. On 20 June, after an extremely heavy air and artillery bombardment, troops of the Afrika Korps broke through the outer perimeter of the Tobruk fortress in the south-east corner. The following day the general in charge of the defence of Tobruk sent out emissaries and, to the amazement of many of the defenders, they were ordered to lay down their arms. Last to surrender were the Gurkha Rifles and the Cameron Highlanders who only did so
after being told that they would be exterminated if they refused. Some isolated parties never surrendered at all. They included one led by a major of the Coldstream Guards, who succeeded in taking out 198 officers and men of his own battalion, 188 men of various other units and all his remaining anti-tank guns.

At Tobruk Rommel took 33,000 prisoners and enormous quantities of ammunition, fuel and provisions, as well as 2000 vehicles. Altogether it had been a famous victory.

Before we left Bir Hakim we visited the cemetery. It lies on the south-east side which the Foreign Legion held against the Ariete, a large enclosure, swept by dust storms, out in the minefields, with a memorial bearing the Croix de Lorraine and planted with hundreds of crosses bearing the names of that heterogeneous collection of men from far-flung places who came here to fight the Germans, the first French soldiers to do so since the fall of France, names which every year become more difficult to decipher as the crosses are either blown down by the wind or broken by the camels and goats of the Omar Mukta.