Saved from the Deep
ON 14 DECEMBER, the Western Prince, a British 10,000-ton passenger and cargo ship, had been some 250 miles south of Iceland when the ship was struck by a torpedo fired from U-96. Among the sixty-one passengers was Cyril Thompson, returning to Britain with the draft contract of the shipbuilding deal struck with Rear-Admiral Land and Henry Kaiser in his black briefcase. The torpedo hit the vessel forward of the bridge on the port side with a huge explosion, and a vast column of water shot up and cascaded down upon the decks. Then the ship shuddered and began tilting downwards from the bows. Immediately, the captain ordered everyone to the lifeboats.
It was around 6.40 a.m., and Thompson, in his cabin, quickly threw on more clothes, grabbed his all-important despatch case and hurried to the lifeboats as they were being cleared ready for lowering. The ship was already dangerously low in the water, but he hoped she would stay afloat for a little while more. Clambering into one of the lifeboats, he and the other passengers and crew were lowered on to the water and began rowing for all they were worth, Thompson using his size and rugby player’s build to pull on his oar as hard as he could.
Suddenly, the U-boat emerged, surfacing sixty yards away and several of the crew clambered on to the bridge and took photographs of the stricken vessel. Unbeknown to them, the captain of the Western Prince and a couple of other crewmen had suddenly remembered the ship’s Spitfire Fund Collection was still in the safe and so returned to fetch it. They were still aboard when U-96 fired the fatal coup de grâce. A second huge explosion erupted, this time with a sheet of flame. Very soon after, the ship sank beneath the waves, its whistle blasting mournfully as it did so.
Thompson and the other passengers now found themselves alone in a dark, grey, empty Atlantic, on a rising swell and with a cutting Arctic wind. It was freezing cold. The prospects did not look good for the survivors.
The sinking was announced by German radio, causing huge concern at the Admiralty and a terrible couple of days for Thompson’s wife, Doreen, who happened to hear the news on a German broadcast and understandably feared the worst. Yet her husband was not only still alive, but had the contract still with him. For nine hours, he kept rowing, and then, just as the survivors were bracing themselves for a long and dreadful night, they spotted a freighter and sent up flares. To their enormous relief, the ship spotted them and turned. This was the Baron Kinnaird, and was clearly crewed by men of extreme courage: at just 9 knots, she was too slow for convoy work and so had to sail alone, a far more dangerous means of crossing the ocean. To stop and pick up survivors of another ship was also extremely hazardous, and yet all the survivors of the Western Prince were safely picked up, and instead of continuing to Halifax the Baron Kinnaird turned and headed back to Scotland. It safely reached port at Gourock on the River Clyde at around 10 a.m. on 18 December.
It may well be that the British Government would have signed those somewhat sodden papers anyway, but the fact that Thompson arrived in London straight after his ordeal can hardly have done any harm. After all, it was a reminder, if any were needed, that a way was urgently required to build more merchant ships. On 20 December, the historic deal was signed. Kaiser and his corporations would build the two new shipyards and the ships. What’s more, the ships they would be building would be Cyril Thompson’s latest design, to which he had given the provisional name ‘Hull No. 611’. When completed in the Thompson yard it would be called the Empire Liberty, and it was from this that the term ‘liberty ship’ was coined.
Meanwhile, in the Western Desert, General Richard O’Connor’s Western Desert Force, now renamed XXX Corps, was continuing to make short work of the Italian Tenth Army, and with good help from the RAF. The air forces available were still not huge, although they had been helped by the opening up of the Takoradi route, pioneered before the war and which involved shipping aircraft to Takoradi in West Africa and then flying them across the continent via staging posts to Khartoum in the Sudan and finally up to Egypt. By the end of the year, a further 41 Wellingtons, 87 Hurricanes and 85 Blenheims had reached RAF Middle East since September.
Tony Smyth was now A Flight commander in 55 Squadron, and on the last day of the year had attacked Bardia, now almost surrounded by the 6th Australians, who had taken over from 4th Indian Division, not only dropping bombs but also hurling out empty beer bottles in the hope that the loud whistle of their drop might further damage Italian morale. After all eleven aircraft safely made it back, they flew back over group HQ and dropped a message saying, ‘We have just wished Bardia a Happy New Year. Same to you.’ After landing back at Fuka, some eighty miles west of Alexandria, they were rung by Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, newly arrived as Air Officer Commanding Middle East Air Forces, to thank them personally. ‘This was somewhat different,’ remarked Smyth, ‘from the distant and severe atmosphere of Bomber Command.’ As he was discovering, the atmosphere in the Middle East, with its distance from home, the sand, and extremes of heat and cold, and the necessity of making do with less, was understandably less formal than it was back at home.
For the most part, it was the problems of sand and operating far into the desert that were causing the biggest issues for the air forces in North Africa, but on 4 January, as they were attacking Tobruk, Smyth was hit in the starboard engine and turret and was frantically assessing the damage when his CO, having released his bombs, turned in towards him and they nearly collided. Fortunately, the damage to his Blenheim was manageable, and they flew back without further mishap, passing over a tank battle raging below them near Bardia.
One of those fighting on the ground below was Sergeant Alf Parbery, thirty years old and from Woolgoolga in New South Wales. He and his younger brother, Reg, had both volunteered on the outbreak of war, reaching Egypt the previous February, and both were attached to J Section of 6th Division Signals. Casualties were fairly light, but Parbery found the experience bad enough, with the shelling incessant. Part of their task was to lay field telephone wire, which meant getting out from their hastily dug trenches and running across open land. Even though they did this at night as much as possible, it was still a difficult task, especially with shells exploding around them. Parbery was particularly shaken by the death of their popular company commander, Captain Stewart, who was hit in the head and heart by shrapnel and killed instantly.
Later in the day, Parbery went forward to examine some captured Italian guns only to come under shellfire once more. ‘All our nerves were on edge after such a day,’ he scribbled in his diary. ‘There had been so many near things and the concussion from each shell close by made the head thump.’ He eventually got his head down in a dirty Italian trench and wrapped himself in a dirty Italian blanket.
The following day, the Australians captured Bardia, along with 45,000 Italians and 130 tanks. The Aussies suffered just 500 casualties. Two days later, Tobruk was surrounded, and by 22 January that garrison had also run up the white flag with a further 25,000 Italians, 208 guns and 87 tanks captured, as well as a number of fuel dumps and other stores. With this, General Wavell was ordered to instruct O’Connor to keep going and push on around the bulge of Cyrenaica. The next stop would be Benghazi, one of the larger ports in Libya.
During Operation COMPASS and the subsequent pursuit of the Italians across the desert, General O’Connor had always known he had limited resources. On the other hand, he had a high opinion of his divisions, knew they were well trained and that they were well equipped with vehicles, while those raids and patrols beforehand had shown him that the Italians were low in morale and training despite their vast numbers. ‘It was essential in my mind,’ he said, ‘that we had to make some plan that would throw them off their balance and prevent them from getting full advantage from the large superiority of their numbers.’ He was also helped by their defences, which were in makeshift forts that, while reasonably well fortified, were not mutually supporting.
In fact, COMPASS followed precisely the same principles used by General Guderian during his attack across the Meuse and through France the previous May. In advance of the attack, enemy airfields had been neutralized and then mobile troops had rushed forward, achieving complete surprise. Leading elements had charged onwards, ignoring their flanks and aiming to sever Italian lines of supply. Greater intent, morale, motivation and equipment had overwhelmed a tactically moribund enemy complacently stuck in a defensive mindset. The parallels could not have been more obvious. Similarly, the tactics adopted by O’Connor were not only the right ones but also the obvious solution, dictated by the situation in which Britain found itself at the time. Germany did not have a monopoly on the Bewegungskrieg approach to fighting battles.
Reaching Tobruk just a few days after it had fallen were Ted Hardy and the rest of 2/3rd Field Company of the Australian Engineers. They had reached Suez at the end of December, had spent a couple of weeks training and acclimatizing at Amariya camp near Alexandria, and then were sent along the desert road equipped with bridging, mines, wire and explosives, and attached to 20th Australian Infantry Brigade, part of 9th Australian Division that had been released from England and was now arriving in theatre.
Hardy was only just eighteen, having joined up when he was still only seventeen the previous summer. Born and brought up in Columbia Bay, a small township south of Sydney, he had left school at fourteen and was working in a small engineering factory. Having heard about Dunkirk, he decided to enlist. His boss, who had served in the last war, let him go, even though he was underage. It took Hardy a few attempts, but eventually the recruiting officer accepted his false age and he was in. After training for the best part of five months, he found himself on board the Aquitania, a liner now converted into a troopship, and heading to the Middle East. These were all new experiences, but he took them in his stride. Hardy was a phlegmatic and laid-back fellow.
At Tobruk, he was surprised to see Italians still wandering about. ‘They were waiting in groups,’ he said. ‘There was masses of junk all over the place.’ The engineers unloaded, set up their HQ at the side of a hill near the road to the south of the town, and began repairing the road, which was strewn with broken Italian aircraft and potholes from the Royal Navy’s offshore bombardment.
Back at the base depot of Geneifa near Cairo was Albert Martin of 2nd Rifle Brigade. Just after the lightning strike on Buq Buq, he had come down with sandfly fever and been briefly hospitalized. He was long recovered, but had been sent on a ‘hardening’ course to build up his strength and fitness before being sent back up to the ‘blue’. He was quite enjoying the course, although he was less keen on the guard duty they had to perform looking after the thousands of Italian POWs. ‘So far none of them have tried to escape,’ he noted in his diary. ‘In fact, they all seem very cheerful.’
By the end of the month, Martin was feeling as fit as a fiddle and desperate to rejoin the battalion. By 1 February, he was expecting a draft back up the line at any moment. ‘The news from the front,’ he scribbled, ‘though vague, suggests that our advance is progressing favourably.’ And so it was. The Australians had captured Derna and were hurrying towards Benghazi.
Despite this success, however, there were disagreements rumbling on between Whitehall and GHQ in Cairo. Churchill was not just a Prime Minister, he was a war leader too, and from the outset had regularly bombarded field commanders with instructions, suggestions and even what effectively amounted to orders. The trouble was, Churchill hadn’t been overly impressed with the cut of Wavell’s jib, and he worried that he didn’t have enough drive. As far as Churchill was concerned, precious supplies and men were being sent to the Middle East and not enough was happening. First South African Division was now in Kenya, 4th Indian had been moved to Sudan, there were two more West African brigades in East Africa, plus what was now in North Africa and Palestine. Churchill felt that as soon as these men and tanks were in theatre they should be in action, but Wavell, the man on the spot, recognized that equipment needed to be made ready for desert conditions, and men trained and ‘hardened’. There was a massive difference between basic training in England and fighting in Libya or Eritrea.
Caught up in this battle of wills between Churchill and Wavell was not only the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, now General Sir John Dill, but also the Director of Military Plans, Major-General John Kennedy. Since taking up this post in October, Kennedy had discovered that everyone in Churchill’s immediate circle had to dance to the Prime Minister’s eccentricities, him included, whether it be sudden whims and ideas for new strategies or his impossible working hours. Churchill liked to work in bed in the morning, had a siesta in the afternoon, tended to have meetings with the Chiefs of Staff and anyone who was with him at around 9.30 p.m. and often kept them up until one or two in the morning. In this, he was not so very different from Hitler. At the weekend, Churchill always tended to disappear to the country.
Kennedy, to cope with this relentless routine, put a bed into his room in the basement of the War Office. After dinner in the evening, he would go back there, work for a few hours, then have a discussion with Dill around 10 p.m. The CIGS, Kennedy noticed, was becoming increasingly exhausted by the combination of Churchill’s demands and daily routine. A huge argument between the two, for example, had erupted in December over Churchill’s insistence on capturing the Italian island of Pantelleria, to the south-west of Sicily. It was an idea the PM had been pressing for some time, but which had little strategic benefit and would potentially tie up a lot of resources. The policy of the General Staff, agreed upon by both Dill and Kennedy, was to build up resources both at home and in the Middle East and to avoid any unnecessary operations. ‘We wished to do nothing,’ noted Kennedy, ‘that would postpone decisive action; we considered it rash to risk unnecessary reverses merely for the sake of doing something. Churchill, on the other hand, thirsted for action.’ Dill, especially, who was first in the firing line, found dealing with Churchill quite a battle in itself.
One of the biggest causes of disagreement between Wavell and Churchill, however, was over East Africa, where large numbers of Italian troops commanded by the Duke of Aosta were, to a large extent, marooned; so while a quarter of a million troops sounded quite a lot, there was every reason to suggest they might be even less of a proposition than those in Libya, who were at least still linked to Italy by the Mediterranean sea lanes. Ironically, Churchill’s view was that the combination of blockade and internal revolt sponsored and supplied by Britain would probably see off Mussolini’s East African empire. Wavell, however, disagreed and felt that, as things stood, the Italians were still a threat to Kenya, with its key staging ports, and Sudan, with its links to Egypt. He preferred to do it the proper way. That, however, meant using troops which Churchill believed could be better employed elsewhere, especially since he had assured the Greeks that Britain would send troops to help them.
For the time being, the Greeks were doing just fine without them, so, by January, Wavell’s initial plans to gently probe forward into East Africa from Kenya and Sudan had developed into a more full-scale offensive. On 19 January, General Platt attacked in the north of Abyssinia from Sudan with two Indian divisions. The following day, the Emperor Haile Selassie, in exile since the Italian conquest, re-entered Abyssinia with a force of ‘Patriots’ – Abyssinian troops reinforced with the Sudan Defence Force and with a maverick young British major hand-picked by Wavell called Orde Wingate.
Meanwhile, in the south, General Alan Cunningham, brother of the admiral, was mounting a series of harassing raids with a combination of South African and East African troops. Cunningham had originally proposed to launch his southern offensive in May, but so poor was the resistance to his harassing raids he decided to bring it forward to February. Similarly, Platt was also finding Italian resistance weaker than he had supposed. Suddenly, it looked as though a comparatively easy and swift victory might be possible after all.
That was all very well, but looming very heavily by the beginning of February was the need to intervene in Greece, especially since it was surely only a matter of time before Germany did. And for that, and to keep momentum going in North Africa at the same time, every man and piece of equipment available would be needed. It was true enough that in the last war General von Lettow-Vorbeck had led the British a merry dance in East Africa and tied down far more troops than Britain would have liked, of which Wavell would have been all very aware; but the Duke of Aosta was not cut from the same cloth as von Lettow-Vorbeck, and Italian troops were not imbued with the same fighting spirit and ingenuity as the Germans. In the present circumstances, Churchill’s original suggestion might not have been such a bad one. After all, apart from the Italians’ capture of the virtually undefended British Somaliland the previous summer, there had been nothing to suggest the Duke of Aosta was any more inclined to attack than Graziani. The truth was, Italian East Africa was cut adrift from the rest of Italy with no real means of supply, the morale of its troops was low, and there were plenty of Africans eager to exact revenge. With this in mind, it’s hard to see why Wavell could not have parked East Africa for the time being and fought more pressing battles first. On this matter, Churchill had probably been right.
