mass desertions. A week later, Benghazi fell. Three more weeks of marching, fierce fighting, armour battles and artillery exchanges brought the 8th Army back to El Agheila. Finally, after the loss of thousands of lives and many battles, the British were back in the Roman fortress they had captured in February 1941. Of that first British conquest of El Agheila in the Libyan province of Cyrenaica, Alan Moorehead had written,
The ancient law of the desert was, in fact, coming into play. Once more the British had proved you can conquer Cyrenaica. Now unwillingly they began to prove that you cannot go on. It had been the same for both sides. Tripoli and Cairo were equidistant from Cyrenaica … The trouble was that the farther you got away from your base the nearer the retreating enemy got to his. Consequently as you got weaker, the enemy got stronger.
This time, though, the British did not weaken. They solved some of the supply problems by rebuilding the shore ports that Rommel’s sappers had destroyed. The British assaulted El Agheila on 11 December and battled for a week to expel the Germans. The chase continued from Libya’s Cyrenaica province into Tripolitania. On 23 January, the 8th Army captured the Libyan capital, Tripoli. It was John Bain’s twenty-first birthday. At the victory parade, Montgomery praised his soldiers for advancing 1,300 miles in three months. Their achievement, he said, was ‘probably without parallel in history’. Winston Churchill, in Libya to share the glory, declared, ‘Let me then assure you, soldiers and airmen, that your fellow-countrymen regard your joint work with admiration and gratitude, and that after the war when a man is asked what he did it will be quite sufficient for him to say, “I marched and fought with the Desert Army.”’
The desert war moved to Tunisia, where the Axis received fresh reinforcements from Germany to block the Americans in the west and the British from the east. Taking advantage of the Mareth Line defences the French had built years earlier against a potential Italian thrust from Libya, the German and Italian forces dug in again to meet the British onslaught.
The 5/7th Gordons had endured searing daylight heat, freezing nights, rainstorms and long spells without cooked food or rest. Many had won battle honours, more lost their lives. Replacement troops were sent to the front to fill the missing men’s places. One was a Scotsman from Banffshire named Bill Grey, who had volunteered from ‘a cushy pen pushing job in Palestine’ to go into combat. Bain thought he was brave, having been seen to stand up to a tough, drunken sailor and to play football well. Yet, when he and Bain became friends, Grey admitted having made ‘a colossal blunder’ in joining a frontline unit. Battle terrified him.
The deaths and wounding of the men around him affected John Bain more than the valour and the medals. Although he claimed not to be brave, he did not run from combat. He recalled that a captain in his company did, during a ‘a mock attack on the Mareth Line’. The feint involved walking through a minefield to draw German fire that would allow the 2nd New Zealand Division to make ‘a flanking movement called a left hook’. Bain, at that time the company runner, stayed beside the captain ready to transmit his orders.
We were going through this minefield. Our artillery was what they call a creeping barrage, so the range is gradually increased as the infantry goes in. Somehow it went wrong. Either the creeping barrage wasn’t creeping fast enough, or we were advancing too quickly. We were under our own twenty-five pounders, and the German 88s were coming the other way. In the middle of this minefield, somehow we had wandered off the track, and the German machine guns, Spandaus, seemed to have a fixed line on the gap, everything seemed to be coming at us. I remember crouching down, because all this stuff was coming over. Without warning to us, the artillery centre put down smoke as well. Someone thought it was gas. I was crouching down with my head down, and the company commander on my right, not looking at anything. All you’re doing is your teeth are chattering. And you’re praying and you’re swearing. I looked to see how he was getting on, and he wasn’t there. He deserted. He’d gone back. He ran away in the middle of an attack. I never knew what happened to him. That was the last time I saw him.
The Tunisian fighting became so fierce that an officer in the Scots Guards Regiment wrote, ‘I have seen strong men crying like children.’
General George Patton’s II Corps drew the German 10th Panzer Division away from the Mareth Line, and Montgomery’s offensive dislodged the rest of the German forces on 27 March. The Germans established their next line of resistance about twenty miles to the north in Wadi Akarit, a deep sand gulley four miles long and normally impossible for vehicles to cross. However, the winter rains had stopped and the ground was drying. To its left, away from the sea, was high ground along the Roumana Ridge. While waiting for the British to arrive, German engineers reinforced the wadi and the ridge with entrenchments, observation posts, mines and barbed wire.
The assault at Wadi Akarit began on the night of 5/6 April. Bain, whose recollection of earlier battles was sketchy, recorded with a poet’s eye almost every detail of the brutal but relatively minor engagement. ‘The ridge of hills was a dull grey dusty shade like the hide of an elephant,’ he wrote.
After the sun had set, the surface darkened to a smoky blue which gradually melted into the gathering darkness. But, although the ridge was not physically discernible, there was not a man in the battalion who was not aware of its menacing bulk as they moved as quietly as they could to the area at the foot of the hill where they were to dig in and wait for the dawn when the other battalions in the brigade would pass through their positions and attack the enemy in the hills.
Just before daybreak, Bain and his Scottish friend Hughie Black were sheltering in a slit trench. Black looked behind and said, ‘They’re coming Johnny. Here they come. Poor bastards!’ As a battalion of Seaforth Highlanders came close, Black said, ‘All the best mate!’ One of them answered, ‘It’s all right for you Jimmy … Lucky bastard!’ Bain recalled the Seaforth’s ‘tone of voice did not carry true resentment: it was rueful, resigned.’
Although John Bain absorbed every sound and smell of the battle, he was so remote from the experience that he wrote of himself in the third person. Watching the Seaforths pass his trench, ‘John felt immense relief that he was not one of them but the relief was tainted with guilt.’ He told Black that he feared that the Seaforths would reach the ridge at daylight and be ‘sitting ducks’. ‘Hughie nodded. “Sooner them than me. But let’s hope they chase the bastards out. ’Cos you know what’ll happen if they don’t? It’ll be us in there with the bayonet. And I don’t fancy that one little bit.”’
Gunfire erupted along the ridge. ‘They [the Seaforths] were easy targets for the German machine gun fire,’ Bain told an interviewer later. Major G. L. W. Andrews of the 5th Battalion of the Seaforths remembered, ‘Once daylight came, I lay with my glasses fixed on Roumana, but not a man could I see amongst the clouds of slate grey smoke and chestnut dust which cloaked the entire ridge as the German guns and mortars hit back.’
In his memoirs, Bain continued the story: ‘Twilight was sharpening into the metallic, clearer greyness of early morning but you could not see much of what was happening in the hills. Human figures moved insectile and anonymous in little clusters, forming irregular patterns that kept breaking and coming together again.’ A battle was taking place, but B Company’s orders were to stay in the trenches. The commander of D Company of the 5/7th Gordons, Major Ian Glennie, recalled that the advancing battalion fought at the base of cliffs a mile ahead. ‘We then could do nothing but watch, but couldn’t see very much at all.’
While the Gordons waited, Hughie Black bewailed the army’s failure to provide breakfast or even a cup of tea. He drank some water from his flask, but spat out the ‘camel’s piss’.
A lieutenant from Headquarters Company brought orders for B Company’s Corporal Jamieson to take the platoon up to the ridge. The men stepped in single file towards the sound of firing. John Bain’s rhythmic plodding along the sand, combined with six months of unrelieved anxiety, induced in him ‘an almost trance-like indifference to, or
