– Port Said. The transit camp at Port Said did not hold much appeal, either in anticipation or in reality. The nothingness of Port Said is reflected in the absence of any diary entries for the five days of our stay. Furthermore, I remember nothing of it except for its significance in the long road home from Asia to Europe.
On 1 February 1944 we boarded a troopship, the MV Dilwara along with hundreds, possibly thousands of other troops, thus suggesting a mass military movement rather than a stealthy landing of Specialist Forces. Guesses were limited therefore to Italy or Tunisia as a possible base for our operations but as always, guesses they had to be. There were even some optimistic souls who imagined we were destined for Blighty, to prepare for the ultimately inevitable landing in northern France if the war was going to be won. It was a theory which collected some credence as we sailed, then hove-to to assemble into a sizeable flotilla which, when it did move-off, proceeded only to Alexandria to merge with an even more substantial waiting convoy. Acclimatised to troopship conditions, and aware that our sailing westwards in the Mediterranean indicated a short trip, the horrors were relatively minimal. It was a fairly relaxing trip, allowing plenty of time for meditative stocktaking – a pleasing contrast in itself after what had been a couple of months of feverish activity. I could reflect on being pleased about many things. I derived considerable satisfaction from coming through the personal challenge of parachuting without anxiety, regret, or more importantly, injury.
Another measure of our good fortune had taken a little longer to positively manifest itself: I had been allotted a first class gun crew. There were four Scotsmen (three from the same heavy anti-aircraft artillery unit, who had already been overseas for three years) and a Cockney. The Scots were a delightful mixture of talent and personality, who were already close friends of deep understanding. Archie Lundy, a Lance Bombardier and therefore my deputy, combined handsomeness and athleticism with high intelligence and wit: he could be a voluble man, particularly where his principles were at stake. William Laird Brown, sometimes Bill, sometimes Tony (a derivation of Twinny – he had a twin brother) but more often Topper, displayed an outward appearance of calm and even (I always suspected, deliberate) slow-wittedness. This totally belied his keen mind, mischievous sense of fun, dedicated ideals, ready perception of duty and, perhaps even more so than Archie, his superb prowess. Both Archie and Topper would have become automatic choices for any football team, which the Battery, or even the Regiment, would field if ever we had come together again as a whole.
Bert Roger, their friend in arms of many years, was a vastly different kettle of fish. A droll, dour sage of a man, Bert was by far the oldest amongst us. Combined with his longer background of civvy-street working life as a stockbroker in Glasgow, his ubiquitous, tranquilising pipe and his economy of words and physical exertion, this made him seem like a displaced aristocrat. He succeeded in making one feel guilty for allocating to him any manual – or menial – task that might soil his hands. In truth, he never dodged his fair share but still managed to convey that he lived in a cruel world. His torpid approach to exercise and his slight, lethargic stature made me wonder admiringly about the suffering he must have endured during his parachute training. In Willie Kirkwood, the fourth Scot, we had a rogue. An undisguised product of the worst slums in “No Mean City”, Willie had the guile and cunning which every outfit needs for acquisitive, fair-share survival in an often cruel, competitive world. Charlie Winch, the final member of the crew, was a Londoner. After surveying the other gun crews I had no doubt whatsoever that I had fared best in the lottery. Our whole relationship was totally devoid of the dispute and rancour that seemed to affect the other crews. We trained without the need for any spoken reminders of rank or of our interdependence on each other.
The progress of the war had also begun to justify cautious optimism by February 1944, as our majestic convoy sailed unmolested. The Russians continued to roll back the enemy’s eastern front and had already crossed the pre-war Polish frontier. The Americans were beginning to alter the balance of power in the Pacific. Allied progress in Italy had been slow-but-sure up the Adriatic. Whilst the bombing of Germany intensified from Britain in closely co-ordinated operations of the RAF and the US Army Air Force, the air assault on the Balkan countries and Central Europe was under way from newly operational bases in Italy. At about the same time, Churchill and Roosevelt were announcing a measure of success in the Battle of the Atlantic, with the news that merchant shipping losses were 60% less than those of the previous year. The only dampener on all this optimism was the knowledge that my movement would indefinitely disrupt the flow of letters from home. The immediate future held only bleak prospects for personal communication.
“We bonded. We polarised... We learnt new vulgar songs, one of which was to become our notorious signature tune.”
Chapter IV
Europe Again
After landing at the Italian port of Bari we spent most of the day draped over the rails awaiting landing orders, gazing compulsively at docks, desolation and, for the first time, masses of lolling, mildly inquisitive American army men strewn amongst stacks and assemblies of guns, ammunition and miscellaneous supplies vital for the prosecution of a war. The whole scene was one of assembled power and resources – a further reminder of the volume factor in the American contribution to the Allied war effort – which, with the assortment of shipping itself, paradoxically created gnawing misgivings at the vast, unmissable target it presented to an enemy air attacker.
Presumably, the Luftwaffe were more vitally engaged elsewhere. However, somebody in authority must soon have experienced the same anxieties as myself about the dockside breach of all we had been taught about dispersal, for our disembarkation with only battle-order kit, was followed by a march of a couple of miles or so, without complaint, to some open land which did not deserve its description even as a ‘temporary’ transit camp.
The diet of hard rations was soon supplemented with unsolicited contributions from friendly, curious and bountiful American soldiers, whose spam made a change from bully-beef and whose frank, open warmth of approach made a surprising change from the usual mutual initial suspicions which operated when British units met.
If we envied them their kit and supplies, we could at least take some comfort from our special-forces equipment being vastly superior to that of ordinary units of the British army. Bedding-down that night was a perfect example. Our lightweight, snug sleeping bags offered a better guarantee of quality sleep under our easily portable two-man bivouacs than did the poor bloody infantry’s blankets under the stars. Truth be told, sleep did not come easily on that first night back in Europe after almost two years. Danger had nothing to do with it: the battle for Italy was too remote to be heard. When I think now of the thousands of lives that were lost in the long struggle for the conquest of Italy, which went on until the last day of fighting in Europe, I imagine that each one of those who died spent their first night in Italy in similarly disturbed, optimistic excitement at the prospect of being pointed in the right direction for home. I think I was rare though in also finding space in my thoughts for regrets at leaving the Middle East, and a dreamy, unrealistically optimistic ambition to return there again under different circumstances.
With typically unquestioned military mystery, a fleet of lorries arrived the next morning bearing the rest of our personal kit from the Dilwara. After we had boarded the vehicles as bidden, the convoy then set off northwards along the Adriatic coast road for sixty or so miles to a small port called Monopoli, where we were billeted in reasonably comfortable, if overcrowded, conditions in a school building at the town’s outskirts. Monopoli, being some thirty miles south of Bari – which we knew had been taken by the Allies within a few weeks of the landings in Italy in September – appeared to show few of the outward signs of the ravages of war but, being typical of the neglected towns of southern Italy, nevertheless had the appearance of a sad, down-at-heel countenance of deprivation. I had not then heard the northern Italians’ jibe about the south but if, as the yarn goes, one did draw a line across Italy from Rome to Rimini to find something of Africa below the line, I have to say that my first impressions of Monopoli’s people would have enhanced the reputation of Africa in my reckoning. Everyone had heard of the charges of cowardice, duplicity and chameleon
