10
On breaks from the desert, Sam Pritchard and his friends had a well-established programme of rest and recreation. They would ‘collect four to six weeks’ pay, then spend it within two to three days on good food, good drink and the best … accommodation available’.1 Arriving in Cairo from his base at Gambut in Libya, the sergeant navigator from 216 Squadron would check into his hotel and ‘luxuriate in the bath for about two hours from 9.30 am onwards, during which a hotel servant brought me a succession of cold Stella beers’. Then, ‘dressed in my smartest bush jacket, immaculate slacks and “brothel creepers” I rendezvoused with friends at Groppi’s or the Exmorandi Bar’. They lunched on ‘wonderful fresh sea-foods, covered in sliced tomatoes, cucumber and other salads’ washed down with more drinks. He then repaired to the hotel for a siesta before a servant awoke him by prior arrangement with a heart-starter of a raw egg mixed with brandy which rendered him ‘suitably refreshed and full of beans for another rendezvous with friends and another night on the town’.
Three days of this was enough to empty his wallet and sap his strength to the point where he was ‘sufficiently shattered and flat broke to return contentedly to my tent in the desert’. He found the sharp contrast between the dangers and hardships of life at the front and the fleshpots of Cairo strangely satisfying. The return to action ‘felt like a ‘period of spiritual atonement and asceticism. Never again in our lives would we relish the ambrosia nor taste the nectar in quite the same way once the “desert” component had been taken out of the equation.’
Pritchard was a nonconformist minister’s son from North Wales. As for many of the British and Commonwealth and Allied refugee airmen who passed through the Middle East it was his first experience of ‘abroad’ and he was determined to make the most of it. Although he was only dimly aware of it at the time, as well as having a great adventure he was making history. The war in the desert would turn out to be a major evolutionary advance in the life of the RAF, in which its individual capacities and strengths were bundled into a powerful, coherent whole. Pritchard and his comrades were the instruments of a great achievement, albeit one that was a long time coming. In the Middle East, the Air Force became the essential element in the Allied war effort. In the campaigns in the Mediterranean and North African desert of 1940–43 air power came of age. It was the fulfilment of a long-proclaimed prophecy, though not at all in the way that Trenchard and his followers had envisaged.
The air war in the desert had its own particular feel. It was fought in a unique environment. Navigation was easy. There was bright blue sea on one side and sand and rock on the other. The battlefield was largely empty. Apart from bands of nomads and the inhabitants of coastal towns and villages, compared to northern Europe there were hardly any civilians to worry about. The landscape and environment had little meaning. When you landed, there were no family or friends on hand to give you moral strength, nor familiar streets, cinemas and pubs to remind you what it was you were fighting for. Nor was it the homeland of your enemies, just a way station on the long journey to the end of the war.
For the airmen, the fighting never stopped. In their role supporting the Army and Navy, there was always work to do. Later, some tried to romanticize the desert air war as something clean and chivalrous, an ennobling experience. The camaraderie that was forged between the Allied forces, whether airborne or earthbound, was real enough. So, too, were exhaustion, hardship and what the Australian fighter ace Bobby Gibbes called ‘violent, terrible fear’. He was ‘not afraid to confess to being frightened. I was almost always terrified.’2 Nor did he shy away from admitting to feeling its awkward corollary; the joy of survival, revealed in a passage describing his mood immediately after a combat: ‘The enemy has completely disappeared. You then collect the remnants of your squadron, count them hastily, then the fires burning below. Some of the fires … contain the mutilated bodies of your friends. But as you look down you have no real feeling other than … probably terrific relief that it is them and not you … as you fly back to your base, now safe at last, a feeling of light-hearted exuberance comes over you. It is wonderful to be alive …’
Britain needed desperately to hold on to the Middle East. If Egypt fell the Suez Canal would go with it. There would no longer be a direct route to the East and the resources of the empire, and the path to the oil fields of Arabia and Persia, on which it depended for a twelfth of its needs, would be blocked. As long as Italy stayed out of the military equation, Egypt was reasonably safe. On 10 June 1940, with France staggering towards collapse and Britain looking isolated and vulnerable, Mussolini declared Italy’s entry into the war on the side of what he was confident were the sure-fire winners.
At a stroke, the strategic picture for Britain changed in a way that was every bit as dismaying as Germany’s lightning conquest of Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France. A large Italian force was parked next door to Egypt in Libya. Deprived of the resources of the French navy, the British fleet now faced the sizeable and modern Regia Marina, alone. In the air, the Regia Aeronautica was equipped with machines that were as good as those the British could muster. The threat came from the south as well as the north. Large Italian forces were concentrated in the recently conquered territories of Abyssinia and Somaliland. The British garrison had also to contend with unfriendly neighbours in the Levant, in the shape of the pro-Vichy French forces in Lebanon and Syria. To complete the strategic horror show, Britain faced the prospect of the Balkans and Turkey falling to the Axis, thus completing their conquest of the entire northern shore of the Mediterranean.
Against this, the British could dispose only forces that, in the wry words of Denis Richards, were ‘exiguous even by our own standards of military preparation’.3 Reinforcing them and supplying them would present huge difficulties. There were yet more factors that further reduced the chances of success. In the early days, the theatre commanders of Army, Navy and Air Force were subjected to constantly changing orders from London as Churchill and the service chiefs struggled to meet new menaces which always arrived much more quickly than anticipated. The atmosphere of the solitary and desperate year from June 1940 to June 1941 seemed to incubate miscalculations. Chief among them was the decision at the end of 1940 to divert major resources away from North Africa to shore up Greece in its battle against first, Italy, then Germany. At the time, the top echelon of decision-makers agreed it was the sensible and proper thing to do. It soon became clear they had blundered, ensuring a debacle that set back victory in the Middle East by years.
The RAF’s Middle Eastern Command bore great responsibilities and disposed minimal assets. It covered an area of four and a half million square miles including Egypt, Sudan, Palestine and Trans-Jordan, East Africa, Aden and Somaliland, Iraq and neighbouring territories, Cyprus, Turkey, the Balkans as well as the Mediterranean, Red Sea and Persian Gulf.4 In June 1940, its commander-in-chief, Arthur Longmore, had twenty-nine squadrons to work with, equipped with an array of inter-war-period museum pieces. The bomber force had a single squadron of the latest Mark IV Blenheims. The rest was made up of Mark Is, supplemented by Vickers Wellesleys and Bristol Bombays. The fighters were all Hawker and Gloster biplanes. In time, aircraft numbers would expand vastly. In October 1941, the Western Desert Air Force (WDAF) which supported the Eighth Army in its back and forth battles across Egypt, Libya and Tunisia had sixteen squadrons (nine fighter, six medium bomber and one tactical reconnaissance) and fielded about 1,000 combat machines. A year later, there were twenty-nine squadrons and more than 1,500 aircraft, almost all new or newish types, more than twice the number the Axis could put in the air.
To stay in the war, Britain needed the resources of its overseas territories. The manpower of the Commonwealth would be a vital source of strength. The RAF was a particular beneficiary and, of the 340,000 men who served as aircrew in the course of the war, 134,000 came from abroad. The WDAF included squadrons from the South African Air Force, the Royal Australian Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force as well as exile units made up of Poles, Free French and many other nationalities. Sons of the empire were well represented at the top. Arthur Longmore was born in New South Wales. Raymond Collishaw, the Desert Air Force’s aggressive chief in 1940, and according to Arthur Tedder ‘the very epitome of the offensive spirit’, was born on Vancouver Island to Welsh parents who came to the RAF from the RNAS where he had ended the previous war as the service’s highest scoring pilot. His successor, Arthur Coningham, left a rackety family background in New Zealand to join the RFC where he became known as ‘Mary’. His father was a Test cricketer and also a con man who was forced to shift the family from Australia after he was exposed trying to blackmail a Catholic priest. The nickname, according to his biographer Vincent Orange, was ‘worn down from the original Maori (then thought suitable for any New Zealander)’.5 It stayed with him, with his blessing, for the rest of his life. He is a rather intangible figure now, dying soon after the war aged fifty-three when the airliner he was in disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. ‘Mary’ would be as upright as his father was louche, a near-teetotaller who disapproved of swearing, in what was a boozy, expletive-rich milieu.
Australians in particular seemed at home in the desert. Philip Guedalla, a popular historian who travelled the region at the behest of the Air Ministry, put his finger on it after a visit to No. 3 Squadron. Meeting the pilots, equipped only with out-of-date Gladiators, he was struck by their air of ‘reckless willingness and capacity to do something very soon’.6
The war in the Middle East got off to a good start. The Italians held most of the advantages. In Libya, a 210,000-strong army, operating within easy reach of home, stood ready under Marshal Graziani for the order to cross the border. Facing them were only 36,000 British and Commonwealth troops under the Middle East Commander-in-Chief, Archibald Wavell. At sea, the Mediterranean Fleet under Andrew Cunningham now had to contend with the Italian navy without the French, whose ships were either impounded or sunk following the British attack at Mers-el-Kébir in July 1940. The Italian air force had 329 aircraft in the immediate area against the RAF’s 205. In the south, British land and air assets facing the Italians in Abyssinia and Somaliland were even thinner.
Despite the imbalance in forces, it was the British and the RAF who struck first. On the morning of 11 June, eight Blenheims of 45 Squadron came in low over the Italians’ main airbase in eastern Libya at El Adem, south of Tobruk, and caught them utterly unprepared. The raiders were able to drop their bombs and incendiaries with little interference. The raid was followed by another in the afternoon. Eighteen aircraft were destroyed or damaged on the ground, and a pattern had been set of British aggression in defiance of the odds that kept the Italians on the defensive.
On 9 September Graziani’s army finally attacked, crossing the border and covering fifty miles in two days to halt at Sidi Barrani on the coast. The British screening force withdrew in good order to Mersa Matruh, sixty miles to the east. From their base at Ma’aten Bagush, a few miles away, the RAF for the next few months kept the Italians off balance, bombing and strafing and never attacking the same target twice in succession.
Then, in early December, the British went on the attack in an operation that, for the first time since the war began, showed the Army and Air Force acting harmoniously and effectively in unison. Operation Compass was a complete success. On 9 December 30,000 British and Commonwealth troops under the vigorous leadership of Lieutenant General Richard O’Connor swept west in two columns, cutting through the Italian defences. Two months later Graziani’s army was routed and the whole of Cyrenaica was in British hands. The ground forces were supported all the way by a steadily strengthening RAF (between September and the end of the year forty-one Wellingtons, eighty-seven Hurricanes and eighty-five Blenheim IVs arrived in theatre) which kept up a constant rhythm of operations.
All elements of air power were on display, strategic and tactical. In keeping with the precepts of the Air Ministry sages, the bombers undermined the Italian ability to wage war, bombing dumps and harbours. But they also attacked shipping, airfields and anything else that seemed likely to cause the enemy pain. The fighters provided reconnaissance and air cover as well as mounting a British version of blitzkrieg, shooting up the enemy in the path of the advancing troops. On the ground, soldiers and airmen worked together to plan joint operations that would apply violence as purposefully as possible. The result was a triumphant display of aggression when one was badly needed, and victory came cheap with fewer than 2,000 men dead and wounded. By the end, Egypt was out of danger and the acquisition of hundreds of miles of the south-east Mediterranean shoreline greatly extended the reach of the Air Force.
Things turned out equally well in the south. Once again, on paper the situation looked bleak. The Italians had 350,000 ground troops and an all-up total of 325 aircraft. The British forces amounted to about 19,000 men and 163 old-fashioned aeroplanes, widely dispersed around Kenya, Somaliland and Sudan. But most of the enemy soldiers were Africans whose loyalty was doubtful, their air force was plagued by maintenance problems and Ultra penetration of the Italian ciphers meant every hostile move was known. The Italian advances into British territory were pushed back by a pincer movement launched from Sudan and Kenya. On 6 April, Addis Ababa fell. Five weeks later the Italians surrendered.
Once again, the key to success was close co-operation between air and ground. At the spearhead of the Kenya force was the C-in-C of the RAF in East Africa, Air Commodore Bill Sowrey, and a flight of South African Air Force biplane fighters and light bombers which provided air support as needed ‘on tap’. The aircraft belonged to the past but the service they provided was a vision of the future: a joined-up application of air and terrestrial power that would eventually sweep through North Africa, Italy and north-west Europe to deliver Allied victory.
The burden of operating at such long range and with sparse resources weighed on all the service chiefs. To get anywhere they would have to show a spirit of tolerance that had often been absent from the history of their dealings to date. Longmore and Wavell worked efficiently together from the outset, prompting the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, to report back approvingly from a Middle East trip in October 1940 that ‘liaison between the Army and the Air Force is excellent and the RAF are giving support for which no praise can be too high, given their limited resources’.7
The early success, compounded by the Fleet’s victories against the Italians at sea, brought great strategic advantages and laid the basis for future success. The foundation was never to be built on. Early in 1941 aircraft and armour were switched away from Cyrenaica to Greece to protect against a German attack. In February, Rommel landed in Tripoli with the first elements of the Afrika Korps. The thin holding force was no match for his rapid and unexpected advance.
All that had been won would soon be lost and the ground would have to be clawed back slowly and painfully, this time from Germans not Italians. If different decisions had been made at the top the Italians might have been cleared from all of Libya, making a German intervention much more difficult. There would have been no need for a Battle of Alamein and victory in North Africa could have been wrapped up in months rather than years.
By no rational calculation did the Greek campaign seem winnable. Yet a decision that now looks senseless at the time seemed unavoidable. There were factors in play that outweighed strictly military calculations. Britain had pledged to go to the aid of Greece, following Italy’s invasion of Albania in 1939, and the war leadership felt honour-bound to keep the promise. Churchill’s entire strategy depended on luring America into the war, and he feared the negative response in Washington were Britain to break its word. Until that day came, America’s material support was vital to build up the Middle East air fleet.
From January 1941 onwards, Longmore was forced to send one squadron after another to mostly inadequate and inaccessible Greek airfields. At the same time, he had to scrape together aircraft to defend Malta which, from the beginning of the new year, was under attack from Luftwaffe bombers based in Sicily.
By something like a miracle, Malta survived. Nothing that the Air Force could do was likely to tip the balance in Greece. The Nazi invasion was launched on 6 April. Twenty-one days later the Germans were in Athens. There was another disaster to come. In May, after ten days of desperate fighting, British forces evacuated Crete.
The token holding force left in Cyrenaica soon crumbled when Rommel immediately went on the attack confounding British expectations that there would be no offensive before May. By the middle of June, the British line was back where it started. For the next two years, the opposing forces pursued each other back and forth across a front that stretched from El Alamein in the east to Tunis in the west. For the Germans, the campaign was a distraction, a diversion from the titanic struggle on the Eastern Front. For the Allies, it was a precursor battle that had to be won before the reconquest of Europe could proceed. A great chance had been missed, but there was something to be salvaged from the wreckage of lost opportunities. North Africa was to provide the laboratory conditions in which the formula for eventual success was worked out.
As so often in the British war, it took the shock of failure to stimulate real action. Longmore’s period of command was coming to an end. He had made enemies in London as a result of a steady flow of messages lamenting his lack of resources. In the early days, there was never enough of anything – machines, men or equipment. The climate seemed benign after the uncertain British summer and fog, mist, rain, sleet and snow of the long winter but the blue skies and sunshine brought their own problems. Perspex canopies buckled in the heat and the air that the engines sucked in was often laden with sand and dust, making maintenance schedules a Sisyphean nightmare. The air filters on Blenheims had to be serviced after five hours’ flying time, an operation that took three hours. The grit penetrated everywhere, creeping into instruments and jamming the hinges of variable pitch propellers so they could not move from ‘fine’ to ‘coarse’ after take-off.
Longmore appeared to be a good man to handle a daunting situation. He understood the naval perspective from his days flying with the RNAS in the previous war, and was intelligent and cunning, shifting his aircraft around to create a false impression of strength; what Philip Guedalla called his ‘happy gift for “bluffing a full house with a couple of pairs”’.8 His grasp of the political side of command, though, was weak. He assumed that London would welcome his frank appreciations of his difficulties and be anxious to do what they could to help. This was naïve. The most important recipient of his reports soon became irritated with their importuning tone. Churchill seemed unable, or unwilling, to grasp the difficulties the Air Force faced in maintaining aircraft and claimed not to understand the gap between Middle East Command’s paper strength and its operational capabilities.
Even though aircraft began to arrive in numbers in the autumn of 1940, getting them battleworthy took time and there were always a large number of machines that were unserviceable due to the difficulty of local conditions. ‘I was astonished to find that you have nearly 1,000 aircraft and 1,000 pilots and 16,000 air personnel in the Middle East,’ Churchill wrote to Longmore on 12 November. ‘I am most anxious to re-equip you with modern machines at the earliest moment; but surely out of all this establishment you ought to be able … to produce a substantially larger number of modern aircraft operationally fit?’9 Churchill’s testiness seems particularly ungracious given that the Middle East was the only place where there was a patch of light in an otherwise gloomy sky.
Nonetheless, he had a point. When, in the spring of 1941, Air Commodore Cyril Cooke arrived to take over as Chief Maintenance Officer he found the whole repair organization ‘in a deplorable state. Accumulations of damaged aircraft were dotted about the vast Command, and there were practically no reserve machines complete in all respects.’10 He pushed for the creation of a Maintenance Command like the one in the UK, which was eventually set up that summer under Air Vice Marshal Graham Dawson, a boyish dynamo with a domineering personality and a hatred of red tape. The existing repair and salvage unit in the desert was expanded and two more created, all fully mobile, a necessity in a constantly shifting war. At the main bases, Egyptians were hired to expand repair capacity, including recruits from the engineering faculty of Cairo University. Dawson found uses for everything. The limestone hills of al-Mokattam, on the south-eastern edge of Cairo, were honeycombed with caves excavated to supply stones for the Pyramids. Dawson had them cleaned up, floors cemented, walls whitewashed and power laid on to provide workshops for the overhaul of aero-engines as well as secure storage for ‘everything from bombs to photo-paper’.11
Longmore’s lamentations finally got him the sack. In May 1941, he was called back to London for discussions and never returned to Egypt. If he had got the backing of the CAS he might have survived longer, but Portal, too, had turned against him. His place was taken by his deputy, Tedder, a far more subtle political operator who had warned his chief against testing patience in London.12 Unlike Longmore, Tedder nurtured his relationship with Portal, sending him (at the request of the CAS) regular telegrams for his eyes only, giving unvarnished assessments of events, not only concerning the Air Force but all three services.
Longmore had got on well enough with the Army and Navy – indeed, his repeated assertions that they shared his dire view of the supply situation was one reason for his recall, encouraging the suspicion in the Air Ministry that he had gone native. Tedder was brilliant at managing the egos and sensitivities of his fellow chiefs, while at the same time quietly imposing the Air Force perspective on the conduct of the war.
The success of Operation Compass seemed to augur well for inter-service relations in the Middle East. The debacles in Greece and Crete and the setback in Cyrenaica ensured a resumption of the familiar crossfire of blame and recrimination. With the aircraft and aerodromes available to them and the Luftwaffe’s overwhelming strength in numbers and bases it was unreasonable to expect the RAF to give anything like comprehensive protection to ships or ground troops. Nonetheless, according to Tedder, Cunningham, who enjoyed living up to his irascible sea-dog reputation, was ‘prone to sending explosive messages to London about the alleged lack of air support to the Royal Navy’.13 He also anticipated a repetition from the Army of the charges that had been levelled at the RAF following Dunkirk. While the fighting in Crete was still raging he confided to his diary: ‘I am quite sure the Army will say we lost Crete because the RAF let them down. Actually, we have been put out of commission because the Army have lost all our bases for us and without bases one cannot do much … Our fellows have been doing some incredible things over Crete these last few days, but they will never get the credit for doing the impossible.’14
Lord Louis Mountbatten, fresh from having his destroyer HMS Kelly sunk under him by Junkers 87 Stukas during the evacuation of Crete, confirmed this prediction. Tedder recounted how after being buttonholed by Mountbatten in Cairo, he ‘heckled me extensively on the ability of the Hun to move forward quickly and establish, and operate from, forward bases’. Tedder explained patiently that German resources in the area dwarfed those of the RAF but Mountbatten’s high connections and voluble opinions threatened potential trouble.
Later, when a good working relationship was eventually established, the Middle East would be cited as a paradigm of inter-service co-operation. At the beginning, though, Tedder was often exasperated by his colleagues, particularly the soldiers. ‘The Army direction here makes me shudder,’ he wrote on 11 April as the Afrika Korps pressed forward in Cyrenaica. ‘We have got all our reorganisation to meet a new situation practically complete and working but they are still dithering as to … whether General So-and-so is not too junior to take command because George So-and-so is in the offing. ’Orrible!’15 The Army’s (to Tedder’s mind) dismal hesitancy was on display when yet another crisis erupted in May after pro-German rebels launched a coup in Iraq. Wavell was reluctant to send a small emergency force, fearing it would be insufficient to crush the revolt, and preferred to wait until things had quietened on another front, freeing up troops for a proper expedition. Tedder recorded in his diary that ‘two men and a boy could do today what it would require a division to do in a month’s time’.16
These frustrations, he confided to his diary, meant that ‘there are times when I nearly lose my temper with the Army’.17 But he did not. A positive outlook, reinforced by a wryly humorous view of the world, steely self-control and a willingness to rehearse his arguments ad nauseam served him better. There was a lot to contend with. The recriminations over Crete inevitably raised the old question of whether it be better for the Air Force to be split up so that the Army and Navy could control their own air support. Eventually, sailors and soldiers would accept his argument that it was a choice between ‘the feeble single stick and the bundle of faggots’.18 Crete had proved beyond doubt ‘the central fact of the war’, that ‘air superiority was the pre-requisite to all winning operations, whether at sea, on land or in the air’.19 Victory required machines and men and a command and control operation that was closely meshed with the needs of the soldiers and sailors. Above all, it needed bases from which to operate at maximum effectiveness. ‘This campaign,’ Tedder had concluded in the early summer of 1941, ‘is primarily a battle for aerodromes’.20
Tedder’s prescriptions were given substance by a heartening improvement in RAF resources. Portal secured approval for a major Middle East reinforcement that would boost strength to fifty squadrons. In mid-May the ‘Tiger’ convoy docked, virtually intact, at Alexandria carrying 238 tanks and forty-three Hurricanes. At the same time, aircraft were being flown in from West Africa via the ‘Takoradi Route’.
The 4,000-mile supply line across the waist of Africa was a heartening example of official foresight. Envisaging a day when Mussolini might act on his assertion that the Mediterranean was ‘Mare Nostrum’, an alternative route to Egypt had been mapped out before the war began. It was based on the infrastructure put in place by Imperial Airways to open a weekly civil passenger and mail air service between Lagos and Khartoum which began to operate in 1936. The RAF extended the chain to the port of Takoradi on the British Gold Coast, where ships delivered crated aircraft which were reassembled and flown in convoy, staging at Lagos, Kano, Maiduguri, Fort Lamy (in the hands of the Free French), Geneina and Khartoum, finishing at Abu Sueir, seventy miles north-east of Cairo. The first flight of reinforcements, one Blenheim and six Hurricanes, took off on 20 September 1940.
Operating the Takoradi Route soaked up nearly 7,000 men but the investment was worth it.21 During the war it would feed more than 5,000 aeroplanes into theatre. With America’s greater involvement and eventual entry as a belligerent the crates swinging off the cargo ships increasingly contained US machines – Curtiss Tomahawk, then Kittyhawk fighters, not as good as a Spitfire perhaps but the performance equivalent of a Hurricane. After reassembly, they had to be test-flown, often by pilots who had no previous experience of the type. James Pickering, a ferry pilot with No. 1 Aircraft Delivery Unit, remembered how his first briefing before climbing into a ‘Tommy’ was ‘more of a warning than a source of useful information’. Their reputation ‘had not been enhanced when the chief test pilot at Takoradi had been killed testing the first one re-erected from its crate’.22
All aircraft had their foibles. The Tomahawk’s was a unit in the airscrew that leaked oil: ‘Sand stuck to this. It covered the windscreen and quarter panels and blanked forward visibility when landing.’ It also had a tendency to swing on touching down, which novices tried to correct by stabbing at the brakes, tipping the aircraft on its nose or collapsing the undercarriage.
Single-engine, single-seat aircraft made the journey in groups of six, led by a light bomber carrying a navigator and wireless operator who obtained bearings from the next staging post. The pilots were an eclectic bunch including Poles deemed too old for operational flying (among them a former commander of the Polish Air Force, Ludomil Rayski), Rhodesians and greenhorns arriving from England with only twenty hours on Hurricanes behind them. In a break with pre-war service practice the convoy leader, whose authority was absolute, was chosen on experience not seniority so a sergeant pilot could find himself commanding a flight of officers.
The five-day journey was testing, flying over hundreds of miles of thick forest or great patches of emptiness with only the faint trace of a wadi or an outcrop of rock for landmarks, where engine trouble or a navigational mistake could end in a lonely death. Sandstorms blew in from the Sahara blotting out landing grounds and electric tempests arrived suddenly out of cloudless skies, creating what Sam Pritchard, who flew the route often in a Bombay, described as ‘a noisy pyrotechnic display with blood-orange haloes in front and blue flames sparking along the wings’.23 The journey was also exciting and exotic. At Fort Lamy, giraffe-necked native women stooped over crops in the fields around the airfield. For the regular ferry pilots, there were also opportunities for illegal private enterprise. Early on it was discovered that gold purchased in West Africa fetched a much higher price in Khartoum and Cairo. All you had to do was dodge the customs and resist the temptation to be too greedy. A story did the rounds of a fighter pilot who was rumbled when his machine failed to get airborne due to the weight of gold hidden under his seat.
As Sam Pritchard discovered, snake and lizard skins involved no such difficulty. ‘We found that python skins could be bought in Kano for an average of £1 each and sold in Khartoum for an average of £2,’ he wrote. This ‘marvellous loot presented no weight problem when carried by air … a bag of 100 python skins weighed so little it could be carried easily in one hand’. He and his crewmates took the precaution of arranging for a friendly wireless operator on the ground at Khartoum to deliver a coded tip-off as they approached if there was a customs van present, giving them time to jettison the loot. They never had to. He was soon accumulating £100 a trip as his share of the enterprise, but the profits evaporated rapidly in the bars and nightclubs of the city which provided ‘a refuge for wealthy Arabs, Jews, Greeks [and] some fleet-footed Anglo-Saxons, as well as the most alluring prostitutes from many Middle Eastern territories’.
The Takoradi Route was only one trans-African pipeline for aircraft and supplies. The Americans set up a base at Accra which received long-range Liberators, Flying Fortresses and Marauders arriving from across the South Atlantic and fighters flown in from carriers for onward transmission as far as the Pacific theatre. From the autumn of 1941, the RAF base alongside the deep-water dock at Port Sudan in the Red Sea began assembling sea-delivered British and American fighters and American Boston and Baltimore medium bombers. They were then flown from the steamy seaside to the relative cool of the depot at Summit, in the hills sixty miles to the west, for modification to desert conditions before delivery to the squadrons.
At RAF Shaibah, near Basra at the head of the Persian Gulf, crated Bostons and Baltimores were put together for the benefit of the Russian air force. The British and Americans received no thanks for this largesse. The Russian aircrews James Pickering encountered were ‘taciturn and suspicious. On arrival in Shaibah on a transport aircraft they checked the aircraft inventories and would not take the aircraft unless everything was accounted for. They wore uniform with buttoned up collar, regardless of the heat and humidity …’24 The RAF’s encounters with their Soviet allies seldom left fond memories. Aircraft delivering supplies to Teheran after Iran was jointly occupied by British and the Soviet forces were routinely shot at by Russian flak batteries. After surviving this experience one crew were then ordered to help unload the cargo by a Russian officer.
For almost everyone, aircrew and ground crew alike, the journey into theatre was a formative part of their Middle East experience and left a strong impression. The transition from monochrome Britain to the dazzle of the Orient could be abrupt. Despite the risk from the Luftwaffe and Italians, the urgent need for aircraft meant that bombers with the endurance for the journey continued to fly in via the Mediterranean. For the ground crews the change was leisurely, a six-week voyage south through the Atlantic round the Cape of Good Hope, then through the Red Sea and Suez Canal into Egypt.
Neither route was easy. Flying meant an initial, dicey 1,200-mile hop from a southern England airfield to Gibraltar. Sam Pritchard was serving as a navigator with 105 bomber squadron when, in July 1942, the crew were summoned and told they were to deliver a new Blenheim Mark IV to Egypt. They took off from Portreath in Cornwall, the most westerly base in Britain, for the first leg. The flying time was estimated at seven hours, and the maximum fuel load they carried was for seven and a half. It was the longest trip Pritchard had ever done but he nonetheless ignored the briefing officer’s advice to follow a course well out to sea, preferring to stay within sight of the coast even if it increased the risk of interception by Luftwaffe patrols. His boldness probably saved them. They struggled with a strong headwind and his pilot, Ben, ‘went in straight over the harbour onto the runway with all fuel gauges registering zero’.25 A Blenheim following immediately behind ran out of fuel just short of the runway and crash-landed in neutral Spain. The day before another went down into the sea off Cadiz with the same problem.
The sea voyage brought its own anxieties. In May 1943 Brian Kingcome was posted to Malta to lead 244 Wing. It was decided he would travel by boat rather than aeroplane, which would allow him to recuperate after a long period on ops. He travelled to Durban aboard the SS Orion, a luxurious P&O passenger liner in peacetime, now stripped of its refinements and serving as a troop carrier. The first part of the cruise was delightful: ‘The weather was superb, the seas were calm [he wrote]. The flying fish flew and the tropical heat was tempered by the breeze created by our cruising speed of between fifteen and twenty knots. We were in a dream world and the grey clouds, rationed food and general shortages of war torn Britain hardly seemed to be real any longer.’26 Then suddenly ‘the dream was shattered’. Somewhere off the Canaries the on-board atmosphere changed abruptly. It took Kingcome some time to realize that the engines had stopped. ‘The silence was paralysing, almost palpable … we stood and waited wherever we happened to be on the ship, nerves on edge and sensing danger but blind to what it could be or from the direction it might come at us. Then, over the klaxon, sounded the duty officer’s abrasive orders: “Boat stations!”’ As they scrambled to their mustering points they heard the explanation: U-boats had been reported in the area.
These alarms were frequent in the first half of the voyage, but the threat reduced with the journey south. At Durban there was a run ashore where the local whites opened their homes to the troops. Then the fun was over as the sea miles passed and the mood of seriousness deepened as all on board prepared for whatever it was that lay ahead.
Their destination was exotic, a place that most of the passengers knew only from the Children’s Encyclopedia, never imagining that they might see it themselves. Many were grateful for the opportunity for adventure that the war had handed to them, no matter that it came with risks attached. To young men who had never known anything but the muted backdrop of Britain’s towns and countryside, and the essential order of everyday life, Egypt came as a shock. Ernest Bishop, a twenty-one-year-old fitter on his way to the main RAF base at Aboukir, was eager to get ashore when his troopship docked at Port Tewfik at the head of the Suez Canal. During the five-week voyage from Durban he and his comrades had ‘seen only the sea’ and their ‘eyes were greedy for something new’.27 After disembarking and being processed at a nearby transit camp, he and some friends headed off to explore the port. ‘A native village lay between us and the town,’ he wrote later. ‘As we passed through it we were appalled by the squalor. There seemed to be no sanitation at all and the smell of the place was overpowering.’ However, the men they saw lounging about ‘in long white gowns were not at all perturbed by their unpleasant surroundings’. The black-gowned, heavily veiled women they passed took no notice of them. One was carrying an enormous bundle of melons and Bishop marvelled at her strength. Later, ‘learning that women do most of the heavy work, I was more able to understand the Egyptian male’s contentment’.
Ernest Bishop (far right) and pals (Author photo)
Sam Pritchard was repelled by the contemptuous attitude of the pre-war RAF towards the ‘wogs’ and ‘sought to give them every benefit of the doubt’.28 However, he found ‘they were difficult to like and seemed to lack those qualities that I had been brought up to admire – if not always to practice – such as steadfastness, trustworthiness, loyalty, industry and courage’. The wealthier and better-educated seemed closer to the British ideal, ‘but even they seemed unattractive because of their indifference to the vast majority who had nothing …’
There was ‘no great bond of affection between us and the Egyptians’, and Pritchard was honest enough to understand why. Once, when walking through central Cairo he saw a teenage boy carrying a tray packed with trinkets approach a large, drunken soldier who had just emerged from the New Zealand Services Club. The Kiwi ‘brought his great boot up under the tray producing a nuclear-like mushroom of combs, brushes, and other paraphernalia …’ The British passers-by, even some Egyptians, ‘thought it was screamingly funny’. He concluded that ‘in retrospect it was small wonder that the local populace disliked the foreigners in their midst’.
The British presence in Egypt had always been uneasy and its long history of military, political and financial interference had done much in the late nineteenth century to nurture the growth of Arab nationalism. The country had been declared a British protectorate in 1914 after the Ottoman Empire, of which Egypt was nominally a part, sided with the Germans. The British deposed the Khedive and replaced him with Fuad, a member of the same family. He was succeeded in 1936 by his son, Farouk, ‘a rather fat youth in blue suiting and a gaudy tie’, as Tedder described him after their first encounter, who felt bitterly the frequent humiliations he suffered at the hands of his protectors.29 To the British he was sly and ungrateful, the epitome of wog delinquency. According to Pritchard, when at the end of June 1942 Rommel’s advance had taken him to within striking distance of Cairo, his transport squadron’s Bombays were fitted with bomb racks and given provisional orders to attack Farouk’s palace if he decided to abandon Egypt’s neutrality and declare for the Axis. Somewhat to his disappointment, the order never came.
Farouk’s resentment of the British seemed to be reserved for the governing class. My father was canoeing with some friends off a beach near Alexandria one afternoon when Farouk’s yacht appeared. A boat was despatched and the airmen, none above the rank of corporal, brought aboard for drinks. ‘He was gracious, funny and not at all how we expected him to be,’ he remembered years later.30
There was another culture shock in store for some of the new arrivals. The Treasury’s notorious stinginess in the inter-war years seems not to have affected the living standards of the overseas Air Force. Sam Pritchard was delighted by luxurious conditions at Abu Sueir in the Canal Zone east of Cairo which opened in 1917 and had been successively a flying training school and a maintenance base. It had a cinema, a church and the accommodation for all ranks was spacious and cool. The sergeants’ mess was ‘what we imagined the Savoy would be like’ with ‘a club like atmosphere … a spacious bar, sumptuous ante-rooms and veranda and a billiard room with two full-sized tables’.31 The members were another matter. Pritchard and his crewmates found the peacetime NCOs ‘boorish and unfriendly’, apparently resenting the fact that ‘it had taken them many years of service to earn the privileges of rank whereas it took the new breed of aircrew only a matter of months’. With a tour on bombers under their belts, not to mention a hazardous journey out east, they decided that ‘no pot-bellied old sweat from the Trenchard era was going to deprive us of our rightful inheritance’.
The interlude was brief. For those at the sharp end of the Middle East air war, the campaign was mainly lived in the wastes of sand and rock they called ‘the blue’. Control of the airspace above it was the essential pre-condition of victory. Whoever won it would be able to interdict the enemy’s supply lines by sea and land, destroy his stores, attack his airfields, harass his movements and kill his troops. To carry out these operations a flexible force was needed of light bombers, fighters and tactical battlefield machines capable of destroying armour. From its establishment in October 1941 the WDAF gradually accumulated the aircraft it needed to fulfil all these roles, while engaging in daily battles with the Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica for air supremacy.
By the autumn, the Eighth Army was ready to try and push the Germans out of Cyrenaica and relieve Tobruk, which had been under siege since May. Everyone engaged in Operation Crusader understood the central importance of air power, not least the New Zealand Prime Minister Peter Fraser who demanded assurances from Churchill that Kiwi troops would not have to undergo the ordeal they had endured in Greece and Crete of going into battle without adequate protection from the air. Tedder’s cautious assessment of the numbers of available aircraft ignited Churchill’s ire. Impatient as always for action and results, he interpreted this as an indication of defeatism and was all set to give Tedder the sack.32
His alliance with Portal saved him. He went forward to control the whole air operation which began well before the battle proper commenced. In the five weeks before the offensive opened on 18 November, the Air Force flew about three thousand sorties. The prelude gave Tedder ‘the opportunity to show what air power could do when directed from one centre in accordance with a coherent plan’. Aircraft flying out of Malta bombed Naples, Palermo, Tripoli and Benghazi, the enemy ports of departure and arrival, and attacked convoys on the high seas. The dumps where the goods that made it ashore were stored were subjected to a continuous hammering and the supply columns to the front areas regularly harassed. These attacks on the Axis logistics kept its fighters preoccupied, reducing their capacity to interfere with the Allied build-up. Tedder was confident that, overall, the Air Force would continue to give a very good account of itself. But as he wrote to his wife, success, and his continuation in post, depended on ‘whether the soldiers do their stuff’. If they ‘made a mess of it again there is no question at all but that I shall be made the scapegoat’.
By the middle of January 1942 Operation Crusader had succeeded in pushing the Germans out of Cyrenaica and relieving Tobruk, but it was clear that steam was running out and there would be no onward drive to the Axis headquarters at Tripoli. It was an all too predictable performance. Despite the Army’s superior strength (680 tanks with 500 in reserve against Axis figures of less than 400) and the Allies’ domination of the air, success had been laborious. Tedder found that the ground-force commander General Alan Cunningham, brother of the admiral, was easily dispirited and ‘fluctuated between wishful optimism and the depths of pessimism’.33 He also seemed obsessed with his opponent, telling Tedder during a visit to the front: ‘I wish I knew what Rommel was going to do.’ This struck him as ‘a strange outlook for the commander of a superior force’. Auchinleck, who had succeeded Wavell as C-in-C, agreed and Cunningham was soon removed.
The air battle continued reasonably well. The WDAF had the advantage of numbers, with 1,000 aircraft facing a combined German and Italian force of 320. Bad weather and the reluctance of the Axis air to gamble with limited resources meant that opportunities for attrition were reduced. When combats did occur, the newly arrived Me 109Fs and Italian Macchi C202s proved superior to the Warhawks, Tomahawks, Kittyhawks and Hurricane IIs facing them. As Tedder ruefully remarked, a ‘squadron of Spitfire Vs would have been worth a lot’. Policy in London was still to reserve the latest machines for the home front and it would not be until well into 1942 that the first Spits appeared.
One of Tedder’s biggest frustrations was difficulty of providing effective close support to the advancing forces. There were plenty of medium bombers available to bomb the Germans on the ground, but poor communications and the problems of identifying friend from foe meant they were never put to full use. The battle ‘showed only too clearly that we had not yet learned the secrets of bombing in the battle area’.
The initial success of Crusader was short-lived. Before January 1942 was out, Rommel was attacking once again and on the 29th he recaptured Benghazi. Huge air attacks on Malta made reinforcement easier and the reinvigorated Afrika Korps swept east once again. By the end of June, Tobruk had fallen and the Germans had reached El Alamein. The battle would ebb and flow throughout the summer until the new partnership of Alexander and Montgomery finally turned the tide in October.
For the airmen, life in the blue was exhausting, uncomfortable and dangerous. The ground troops were able to benefit from occasional lulls in the fighting. For the Air Force, the action was continuous. Neville Duke arrived in the desert just in time for the start of Crusader. He was not yet twenty, tall, lean, a natural pilot and not at all happy to be there. In the autumn of 1941 he had been ensconced with 92 Squadron at Biggin Hill, flying sweeps over France by day and hitting the London bars and clubs by night, when he was told he was being posted to Egypt. The bad news came with an assurance that the stint would only be for about six weeks. He arrived at Fayoum airport, south of Cairo, on 9 November with thirteen other fighter pilots, three of whom were killed within a few weeks of arriving.
His first glimpses of the blue were not encouraging. ‘Arrived at Air Headquarters Western Desert at Sidi Hannish at 4 o’clock this afternoon,’ he wrote in his laconic but revealing diary two days later. ‘Not very impressed with the desert at all.’34 The following day the newcomers were briefed by ‘Mary’ Coningham who informed them that their job was to ‘knock down the thirty-odd Me109s the Huns possess and cover the army from bombing’. Duke was joining 112 Squadron as a flight commander, together with his 92 Squadron pal Peter ‘Hunk’ Humphreys. The CO came to pick him up in a car but Duke noticed he was as ‘tight as an owl and I was most put off and quite unhappy’. The following day he was introduced to the Tomahawk. He found it a poor substitute for his Spitfire. After being shown ‘all the knobs and buttons’ he took it up for a first flight ‘and promptly crashed when I landed but only got a few bruises’. By now he was feeling sorry for himself. ‘If only I could get home again,’ he wrote. However, when he informed his fellow 112 Squadrons that he and ‘Hunk’ would be returning to the UK in six weeks ‘everybody laughs and it rather hurts’.
It would be three days short of three years before Duke made it back. By then he was the top-scoring fighter pilot in the Mediterranean theatre, shooting down at least twenty-four enemy aircraft in Libya, Tunisia and Italy. His first German victim was flying one of the new Me 109Fs that were generally held to be superior to the Tomahawks. ‘Squadron went ground strafing along the El Adem–Acroma road,’ he recorded on 22 November. ‘Whizzing along at telephone wire height – some fun. Wing sweep in the afternoon. Engaged by 15–20 Me109Fs. I got on the tail of one and followed him up. Got in a burst from stern quarter and its hood and pieces of fuselage disintegrated. Machine went into a vertical dive and he baled out. Flew round and round the pilot until he landed, then went down to look at him. I waved to him and he waved back. Poor devil thought I was going to strafe him as he initially dived behind a bush and lay flat.’
Duke was a Fighter Boy paradigm: cool, efficient, outwardly light-hearted and always game for fun. But a seam of sardonic melancholy runs through his observations. The war often seems a fatal game in which you kill and expect to be killed and none of it has a higher purpose or meaning. He felt no particular animus towards the enemy. The day before he downed the 109 he was on patrol near Tobruk when two Fiat CR42 biplanes appeared. ‘Attacked same with P/O “Butch” Jeffries and Sgt Carson,’ he recorded. ‘Did three attacks on one which was flying at about 500 ft. He did a few turns and then went in to land. Turned over, after running a few yards, onto its back and the pilot was out like a shot. Butch and Carson started to shoot the poor devil but I couldn’t do it, so I set his machine on fire. Went down to look at the pilot who was running with his hands up. His face was full of fear and the next time I saw him he was lying on the ground. There was no need to murder the poor devil as our troops were coming up …’ This sort of air fighting produced contradictory emotions. Duke candidly admitted that ‘it is a terrific thrill to come pelting out of the sun to let rip at the Huns with the .5s. To see your bullets making little spurts in the sand in front of a truck and then pull the nose up a bit until the spurts no longer rise and your bullets are hitting home.’ But he could not ‘help feeling sorry for the Jerry soldier … they run, poor little pitiful figures, trying to dodge the spurts of dust racing towards them’.
The pace of operations never slackened. On Monday 24 November, the squadron escorted Maryland light bombers on a raid near El Adem returning to their base, Landing Ground 110, to find it swamped with troops and aircraft falling back from an enemy breakout. The following day he shot up tanks and transport near Sidi Omar and took part in a wing sweep in the afternoon which ended in a fight with seventy enemy machines. There were further sweeps on three successive days. Then, on Sunday 30 November, the squadron ran into a ‘circus of 30–40 enemy aircraft’. Duke managed to shoot down a Fiat G50 monoplane fighter, before he was jumped by an Me 109. He ‘dodged 4–5 attacks and got in a few shots at him but he was too fast’.
‘Finally he hit me in the port wing, and I think, the petrol tank. Machine turned on its back at about 500ft, out of control. Saw the ground rushing up and then I kicked the rudder and pushed the stick and prayed. Got control just in time and the machine hit the ground on its belly. Hopped out jolly quick and then darted behind some scrub and lay on my belly about 20 yards from the crash. The Hun came down and shot up my machine, which was already smoking and set it on fire. Horrible crack and whistle of bullets near me and I thought I was going to be strafed but the Hun cleared off. Started to walk across home but saw a lorry coming my way. Lay down behind another bush thinking they were Huns but as they went past I recognised the uniforms and popped up and gave ’em a yell.’
Five days later he was shot down again, and once more it was a 109 that had got the better of him and his Tomahawk. Though wounded in the leg by shell splinters he managed to crash-land at Tobruk, where he was patched up and sent back to Cairo in a Blenheim for a few days’ rest.
Duke never learned to love the desert. The occasional trip to a beach, where the emerald inshore water shaded into an infinite expanse of electric blue, or the diamond-studded brilliance of the night skies, failed to compensate for the general misery of the climate. It rained in winter and baked in summer. The heat of the day was matched by the cold of the nights. And then there was the sand which ‘gets in your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hair, food, clothes, in fact sand everywhere …’
In the blue, things never stayed still long enough for any degree of comfort to be established. Sam Pritchard arrived at Fuka, a satellite near the main 202 Group Ma’aten Bagush airbase in the autumn of 1941to join 45 Squadron. It was equipped with Blenheims and had been given the joint task of tactical support for the Army combined with bombing attacks on ports like Bardia along the coast to the west where supplies for the Axis forward units came in. ‘We settled down … to “life in the blue” – sleeping in tents, eating in tents and relaxing in a sergeants’ mess consisting of a wooden hut with a few wooden or cane armchairs, collapsible card tables and its essential bar,’ he wrote.35
There were no camp beds. Instead he kipped down each night in ‘a flattened bit of sand which we tried to shape so as to accommodate the hip and shoulder with a small amount of sand at the top for a pillow. This sculptured shape was then covered with a waterproof ground sheet and a doubled blanket – grey service issue of the coarsest quality – upon which one lay with one, two or three blankets on top’ depending on the coldness of the night. Pritchard would have found the discomfort more bearable if everyone had been in the same boat. The knowledge that officers received a ‘hard lying allowance’ was ‘an unnecessary and stupid source of disgruntlement’.
They ate the same field rations they would have been given anywhere where British forces found themselves in the world and which made no concession to climate or geography. When Norman Poole arrived at a forward base in Sétif in Algeria early in 1943 he found the ‘food fairly dismal … we saw a good deal of Maconochie’s meat and vegetable stew and other delights of wartime cuisine’.36 Everything came in tins, even the bacon, and the drinking water tasted of chlorine. They supplemented the fare with eggs, bartered from locals in exchange for cigarettes. Player’s – the airmen’s favourite – and other well-known brands were not always available in the NAAFI. There was never any problem getting the officially issued ‘V for Victory’ which tasted, it was said, of camel dung and were smoked only as a last resort. The Arabs soon came to learn the difference, though they were sometimes conned into accepting them when they came disguised in a regular NAAFI pack.
On top of the other privations the sanitary arrangements were primitive. Water was always scarce. Baths, showers and hot water to shave with were a luxury. A trip to the latrines was not for the faint-hearted. The set-up in Sétif was typical. ‘The screens were some distance down wind, in accordance with the field training manual,’ wrote Poole. The pits ‘consisted of a long but stout tree-trunk suspended in a tree fork at an appropriate height’. The spoil from the excavated hole lay at the side to be kicked in when the job was done. The airmen thought it better not to face the ordeal alone and ‘rather than make a solitary trip it was customary to make up a small party or at least a pair …’
On top of all this there was little off-duty amusement to be had. To alleviate boredom they sunbathed, played cards and bet on fights between captured scorpions. The mess – usually a stifling bell or ridge tent – lost much of its appeal when the supply of drink was unreliable. Beer – the Cairo-brewed Stella or hangover-inducing Canadian Black Label – and spirits would arrive on resupply convoys, or was sometimes flown in by enterprising crews. The South Africans benefited from a flow of Cape brandy, provided by their government. As the war moved west towards the vineyards of Algeria, rough red wine and sweet muscatel became available. The uncertainty of the flow meant that when alcohol arrived it was sometimes rationed, a few bottles of beer or tots of spirits a night. In times of abundance it did not sit around for long. Those in authority tried sometimes to dispel the reputation for booziness that hung about the Air Force but the truth was that airmen in general were a thirsty lot. Getting ‘hoggers’, getting ‘amongst the beer’ at ‘pissys’ and ‘binges’ feature with cheerful regularity in Neville Duke’s diaries.
Drinking was therapy, a way of escaping the tensions, frustrations and privations. Jimmy Corbin, a Battle of Britain veteran, arrived at the Maison Blanche aerodrome in Algiers in November 1942 shortly after the US–Allied invasion. His nickname was ‘Binder’ due to a perceived disposition to grumble. In Algeria that winter there was much to bind about. His fighter squadron, 72, slept first on concrete floors, then under canvas at dispersal. The Luftwaffe bombed regularly and the weather was dreadful. Red wine was a rare solace. ‘Got drunk on vin rouge with Chas Pryth Forde in the evening,’ he recorded in his diary on 9 December.37 Overnight it ‘rained like hell again’ and in the morning German bombers hit the town. ‘Brassed off with moving about,’ he wrote. ‘Bags of mud that sticks like glue. Pushing kites for one and a half hours to make way for Beaus. Bloody tired. Covered in mud. A little wine relieves no end.’
The only real escape was a spot of leave, though a few days in Cairo was rarely restful. Off-duty airmen would dutifully visit the Pyramids and Sphinx and have their photographs taken aboard a camel. Then it was on to the city’s multiple cinemas, restaurants, ice-cream parlours and, of course, bars and nightclubs. The egalitarian conditions of the blue, where officers and NCOs, aircrew and ground crew more or less endured the same conditions, did not apply in Cairo. The best hotels like the Continental and Shepheard’s as well as the top restaurants and nightclubs were ‘officers-only’, as were most of the facilities of the sumptuous Gezira Sporting Club on the island of Zamalek. Sergeant Sam Pritchard felt the injustice keenly. As at least 50 per cent of those who flew were NCOs it ‘meant that more than half of all aircrew were denied entry into decent hotels and restaurants’.38 Such distinctions, he came to believe, could ‘partly explain why Mr Churchill lost the post war election’.
He and his friend Jock got around the ban by sewing flight lieutenants’ shoulder insignia on their bush jackets before they arrived in town. One evening in the Bardia, famous for its belly dancers, they ‘got plastered in company with a very smart Wing Commander who was exceedingly friendly. At the maudlin stage we became buddies for life, planning to run an airline together after the war.’ At this point Jock thought it safe to reveal that they were in fact sergeants in disguise. ‘The Wing Commander roared with laughter and said “don’t worry about that chaps – I’m only a f—— corporal!”’
There was no discrimination at Groppi’s, the famous café-restaurant opened by a Swiss chocolatier in the Sharia Soliman Pasha in 1909. According to Pritchard, the founder’s son Achille ‘successfully resisted any attempts by the authorities to designate his establishment “for officers only” so it became a favourite haunt for RAF aircrew on leave’. He and his friends would start their day with an iced coffee in the café before moving on to the bar. They passed the evening in a ‘largish room containing cocktail bars and a dancehall with a small stage for the band which could be opened out on dry balmy evenings’. For Pritchard, who had left a much-loved wife in England, the fun ended there and he stood at the bar ‘watching the HQ wallahs and the Egyptians dancing with their bints’.
The city’s ‘Berka’ district was stuffed with brothels for those who wanted them. Respectable female company was harder to find. At home the women of the WAAF were everywhere, in sizeable numbers on every RAF station, depot and facility. For the airmen they were the natural and obvious first source of friendship, sex and love. There were no WAAFs in the desert and very few in Egypt. By the end of 1942, about 200 were in theatre, all officers.39 Local Palestinians, Greeks and other Allied nationals were hired for clerical and other trades, later reinforced by 2,000 airwomen sent out from Britain to serve all over Middle East Command.
For almost every Air Force member, as for almost every serviceman, life in the Middle East was intensely masculine. There is a sense in the diaries and memoirs that it was better that way. In Jimmy Corbin’s surviving diaries covering the winter of 1942–3 there are occasional references to ‘dames’, ‘females’ and ‘frippet’ but his attempts to connect with them seem more dutiful than urgent. Arriving for a few days’ leave with the rest of the pilots in Constantine, Algeria, at the beginning of February they soon identified the American Bar of the Casino as their watering hole of choice and noted the presence of ‘loads of lush dames’, but when they ‘tried to get the form in the way of frippet’ there was ‘no joy’.40 The following morning he ‘went on a frippet hunt with Judd but no joy’. They consoled themselves with ‘a hell of a session in [the] American Bar on egg flips’.
That night, at the Casino once more, Jimmy ‘gazed with open mouth and a peculiar feeling in certain parts of the body at the beautiful dames’. However, looking was all he could do as ‘the army seem to have the form wrapped’, and the evening ended with another ‘hell of a session’ back in the requisitioned school where they were billeted.
The impression is of much talk but little action. One of the few recorded encounters turned out a rather melancholy business. A Beaufighter pilot described an evening spent in Naples in late 1943 in a flat in the city which the squadron officers had rented as a rest and recreation facility. ‘Naples had always been well-provided with “hostesses” who were able to do a quick conversion course from German to English and the tenancy agreement seemed to include their hospitality,’ he wrote. On his first visit with half a dozen others, including the CO, ‘a couple of the girls joined us. This was quite a novel event and we were happy to share our wine with them and help them to improve their English.’ When it ‘got late enough to think of bed … the general view was that as I was the youngest – still only nineteen – I ought to entertain the youngest girl and the oldest girl was allocated to the oldest of our navigators’.
When they repaired to the bedroom the girl ‘unbuttoned her dress and stepped out of it to reveal she was wearing a complicated arrangement of underwear … a foundation garment with suspenders holding up silk stockings’. His ‘limited experience’ to date ‘was confined to passion killer WAAF knickers and lisle stockings’. The night was not a success. In the morning before the girl left ‘she showed me her family photographs. I suppose they were calculated to increase her reward – and they did – but I was not proud of myself even though my reputation on the squadron advanced considerably.’
The airmen reinforced each other’s spirits through an ethos of ragging, black humour and good-natured moaning. It needed a fair amount of maintenance, and sometimes the jolly façade crumbled.
Returning from a week’s leave in Cairo on 15 December 1941, Neville Duke found ‘the squadron is in a very poor state of morale. Everybody has had enough of the war.’41 The following day the CO called him in to tell him that he was sending two of the pilots who had arrived with him home ‘as he thinks they have “had” it’. Duke wrote that night that he ‘could have cried on the spot when I heard that, as I know I have “had” this war good and proper. Got good and drunk …’
This frank admission from an outstandingly brave man surely reflected a wider mood. It remained hidden to the men at the top, who were perhaps not looking very hard for signs of war-weariness. At about the same time as Duke was recording his despair, Tedder visited some fighter squadrons in the blue and found ‘the atmosphere among them was quite splendid … the whole tone amongst pilots and men was grand. I felt they were a much finer body of men than those of the First World War.’42
Retrospective contemplation of the place of the North Africa campaigns in the overall history of the war has bathed them in a kindly light, the ‘end of the beginning’ where the tide was turned and victory began to feel as if it was inevitable. That was not how it seemed at the time. For those who fought in the air, as for those in the sand and rock below, the desert war was an ordeal in which progress was almost always followed by a check or setback.
The airmen spent little time discussing the wider picture or questioning the competence of the personalities directing the war. In Sam Pritchard’s account, what anger they might have felt was directed at civilians. ‘We were satisfied from the information available to us that the British Army and its commanders were at a disadvantage simply because their equipment was inferior to that of the Germans and to a certain extent we felt the same about our equipment,’ he wrote.43 They were convinced that ‘this inferiority was due to the stupidities of politicians and pacifists between the wars’.
Whether it was immediately discernible or not, victory at El Alamein in October 1942 was a pivotal point and from then on, no matter how difficult Rommel made it for the Allies, their eventual success was assured. A few weeks afterwards, US troops landed in Morocco and Algeria. Henceforth the RAF would always be working in alliance with the American air forces. The arrangement was cemented at the top by the partnership forged between Eisenhower and Tedder. Thanks to the hard-won knowledge acquired in the desert, they took forward a methodology of combined air–ground warfare that carried them unstoppably onwards through the landings in Sicily, Italy and Normandy to victory in the West.