The Sahara Page 16

  Milligan displays sympathy towards the locals while further mocking his brothers-in-arms, observing: “Looking along the line, one caught sight of the odd Gunner piddling against the wheels. I don’t understand it! They have to clean their own transport, and then, when they’ve got the whole of Africa, they piss on their own lorries!” His observations about cultural misunderstandings on the part of the British soldiers are also put to comic effect: “Marches took us through timeless Arab villages, Rouiba, Ain-Taya, Fondouk, when we halted I’d try the Arab coffee; piping hot, sweet, delicious. I watched Gunner White sip the coffee then top it up with water! I explained the water was for clearing the palate. ‘I thought it was coolin’ it down,’ said the descendant of the Crusaders.”

  In a more traditional mode, the war also produced a number of exceptional poems rather than desert-poets, with the notable exception of Keith Douglas (1920-44). Killed three days after taking part in the D-Day landings, Douglas’ desert-inspired poetry is his best, most poignant work. In “Vergissmeinnicht (Forget Me Not)”, an Allied combatant returns to the scene of a battle three weeks after it took place and comes across a German corpse. Like others who wrote from the desert, Douglas displays no hatred towards his declared enemies but instead recognizes the random nature of survival and mortality, sparing a thought for those left behind. In the case of the dead German, “the soldier sprawling in the sun”, his sweetheart is the focus:

  the dishonoured picture of his girl

  who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.

  in a copybook gothic script.

  Another verse by Douglas, “Cairo Jag”, has a soldier on leave wondering, “Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake”? In spite of the available distractions, the soldier’s mind returns to a recently fought battle, and he imagines the dead as neglected tourists:

  But by a day’s travelling you reach a new world

  the vegetation is of iron

  dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery

  the metal brambles have no flowers or berries

  and there are all sorts of manure, you can imagine

  the dead themselves, their boots, clothes and possessions

  clinging to the ground, a man with no head

  has a packet of chocolate and a souvenir of Tripoli.

  Hamish Henderson (1919-2002), once referred to as the most important Scottish poet since Robert Burns, saw active service as an Intelligence Officer in North Africa and Italy. Henderson’s time in the desert inspired his Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica. First published in 1948, he described them as “poems of passive suffering... of stoicism”. Like others who served in the desert, Henderson highlights the unity of soldiery. He never sees Germans as the enemy, preferring to single out individuals who have been forced by circumstances to confront each other, with the Sahara as the common enemy. In the first elegy, he writes:

  There are many dead in the brutish desert,

  who lie uneasy

  among the scrub in this landscape of the half-wit

  stunted ill-will. For the dead land is insatiate

  and necrophilious. The sand is blowing about still.

  Many who for various reasons, or because

  of mere unanswerable compulsion, came here...

  And sleep now. Sleep here the sleep of the dust.

  In April 1945 Henderson was personally responsible for accepting the surrender of Italy from Marshal Graziani. He kept the signed order in his pocket until the day he died in 2002, 57 years after the war’s end.

  While the desert inspired many poets, journalists who wrote about the war did so with more immediacy, reflecting deadlines imposed on them by distant editors. Some of the more famous American names who reported from North Africa included Walter Cronkite, the New Yorker’s A. J. Leibling, Don Whitehead and Ernie Pyle, who wrote for Scripps-Howard Newspapers. One of the most popular American reporters of his

  day, Pyle’s column was syndicated in more than 300 newspapers in the US. His personal, even folksy, writing style and his tendency to see the war through the eyes of the ordinary soldier made his readers feel personally involved in the war in North Africa. Pyle’s reports, often filled with informal observations and filed from the front line, provided details that Americans at home came to rely on for a sense of what was happening. A great supporter of the common soldier, Pyle’s reputation among the troops was enhanced when his calls for “fight pay” led to Congress passing a bill that increased each American combat troop’s salary by $10 a month.

  In January 1943, while with American forces at Biskra, Algeria - but specifically not mentioning this in line with wartime censorship rules - Pyle offered a typically chatty description of the Saharan scenery:

  The only way I can picture it for you is to suggest that you try to visualise some flat endless space in the desert of our own Southwest, with purple mountains in the distance and sand everywhere. Put an oasis of date palms down upon it, so big it would take an hour to walk from one end to the other... it does rain here, but very seldom. Soldiers who have lived knee-deep in the perpetual winter mud of the coastal belt call this the best place in Africa to be.

  Ernie Pyle was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for distinguished war correspondence. He was killed the next April, covering the war in the Pacific.

  Desert Warfare

  Of the many British journalists who covered the war, Alan Moorehead with the Daily Express, and Alexander Clifford, with the Daily Mail, were among the best known. In The Conquest of North Africa: 1940-1943, Clifford writes about the hit and run tactics of the “Jock Columns”, so-called after their originator, Brigadier Jock Campbell. Understanding the desert was all, as Clifford says: “The British commanders dug right down to the fundamental principle of the desert, to the rule that everyone up there sooner or later comes to recognize: use the desert, make the desert help you, play the desert’s game.”

  The Jock Columns were small, self-sufficient vehicle patrols that would spring up seemingly from nowhere to harass German forces when they were least expecting it. Clifford goes on to say, “This was true desert warfare-something that could never be done in a country like France or England or the jungles of Malaya. It was making a friend of the desert, this taking advantage of every opportunity this peculiar battle-field offered ... There was a German report found near Tobruk, written by a senior officer, which said that the British had forgotten more about patrolling than the Germans had ever learned.”

  These lessons were learnt in the decade before the start of the war by that assortment of desert-lovers who explored the Sahara, Ralph Bagnold foremost among them. While Bagnold was on his way to East Africa his ship was forced to stop in Egypt for repairs, so he went to Cairo to visit old friends. While there he was asked as the best-known exponent of desert driving whether he could form a specialist desert reconnaissance unit. The time he spent “messing about” in the desert was suddenly an asset. In double-time Bagnold created what was the Long Range Desert Group, or LRDG: its unofficial motto was Non vi Sed Arte, Not by Strength but by Guile.

  A combination of disparate factors, including Bagnold’s knowledge of sand and cars and his love of adventure, went to make the LRDG the valuable force it became. Sending small units hundreds of miles behind enemy lines, it carried out invaluable intelligence operations, typically engaging the enemy only when forced to, if spotted or attacked. Writing in his African Trilogy, Moorehead describes them as “a collection of young men of the commando type. They were volunteers and trained men. They had their headquarters in the caves of Siwa Oasis and from there they used to set out on incredible journeys many hundreds of miles inside enemy territory. Their safety was the vastness of the desert. They struck unexpectedly by night and got away.”

  Men of the LRDG on patrol

  Winston Churchill, writing in his own history of the Second World War, spoke adm
iringly of the LRDG, noting in particular a detour British forces took around the Mareth Line, French-built fortifications in southern Tunisia that were supposed to keep the Italians out, but which they and the Germans actually used against the British. As Churchill explains, “The route had formerly been pronounced by the French as impossible for vehicles, but it had been reconnoitred in January by the Long Range Desert Group and declared feasible if difficult. Here was not the least valuable of the many services rendered throughout the African campaign by this hardy and highly mobile reconnaissance unit.”

  Inspired by the LRDG, David Stirling of the Scots Guards formed and commanded the Special Air Service, or SAS, which was the attacking counterpart to the LRDG’s intelligence gathering. The importance of SAS activity in the Sahara was twofold: first, raids carried out behind enemy lines had an enormous impact on morale among the Allies; and second, the attacks were a tremendous nuisance to Axis forces. In the course of one raid, in January 1943, Stirling was captured by the Germans and after four escape attempts was sent to the infamous Colditz Castle.

  An entry in General Rommel’s diary clearly shows his delight at Stirling’s capture, as he wrote: “Insufficiently guarded, he managed to escape and made his way to some Arabs, to whom he offered a reward if they would get him back to the British lines. But his bid must have been too small, for the Arabs, with their usual eye for business, offered him to us for eleven pounds of tea - a bargain which we soon clinched. Thus the British lost the very able and adaptable commander of the desert group which had caused us more damage than any other British unit of equal strength.”

  Another early member of the SAS was the some-time diplomat, Fitzroy Maclean. A close friend of Stirling, he was once rendered unconscious after a car-crash caused by Stirling’s reckless driving. After recovering he joked that “Stirling’s driving was the most dangerous thing in World War Two!” The many dramas in Maclean’s early life, as recounted in his memoir Eastern Approaches, may give the impression that one is reading fiction, but while his adventures were real enough, there has been speculation that he was the inspiration for James Bond. Such a connection is not wholly unlikely as Ian Fleming and Maclean were friends, and after his exploits in North Africa, Maclean was sent to Persia and Yugoslavia on a number of secret missions.

  If short on philosophical depth, Maclean’s account is big on excitement. He recalls, for instance, a raid on an Italian fort in the desert behind enemy lines, after which German aircraft were harrying his force. Maclean explains the situation coolly: “We were separated from our base by eight hundred miles of waterless desert, dotted with enemy outposts and patrols, now all on the lookout for us. We had lost several of our trucks, some of our food and a good deal of our ammunition. The enemy knew, within a few hundred yards, where we were... It was a nasty drive.”

  The war in the desert also inspired a slew of fictional accounts, including the Boys’ Own adventures in Biggles Sweeps the Desert. Captain John’s hero, who featured in nearly a hundred titles from 1932 until the author’s death, began his career during the First World War but is apparently young enough to return to “do his bit” in the Second.

  Written in a breathless style suited to its largely adolescent readership, Biggles sets the scene:

  ‘‘All right, you fellows,” he said at last. “Let’s get down to business. No doubt you are all wondering why the dickens we have come to a sun-baked, out-of-the-way spot like this, and I congratulate you on your restraint for not asking questions while we were on our way. My orders were definite. I was not allowed to tell anyone our destination until we were installed at Salima Oasis, which, for your information, is the name of this particular dump of long-necked cabbages that in this part of the world pass for trees. Even now all I can tell you about our position is that it is somewhere near the junction of the Sudan, Libya, and French Equatorial Africa.” Biggles broke off to sip his coffee.

  In slightly more measured tones, Ondaatje’s fictional account of pre-war “desert Europeans” tells much of its story in flashbacks recalled by Almasy, the English patient of the title, as he is being nursed after a plane crash in the desert. Of Bagnold the fictional Almasy says, “We forgave Bagnold everything for the way he wrote about dunes. ‘The grooves and the corrugated sand resemble the hollow of the roof of a dog’s mouth.’ That was Bagnold, a man who would put his inquiring hand into the jaws of a dog.”

  Like Bagnold, in real life Almasy’s intimate knowledge of the desert led him to work for the war effort. As a Hungarian this meant working for Germans, although not apparently unwillingly. At the start of the war Germany had limited intelligence about the Sahara, but as the conflict progressed, and their forces pushed east, German high command needed more intelligence about British intentions. Almasy was given the task of taking German spies across the Sahara to the Nile, from where they travelled to Cairo, relaying information back to Rommel in the desert. Codenamed Operation Salaam, the story is retold in Ken Follett’s novel The Key to Rebecca. For successfully carrying out his mission, Almasy was awarded the Iron Cross and promoted to the rank of a Luftwaffe major. On his death in 1951, Almasy’s obituary in the Geographical Journal, written by George Murray, concludes, “On his desert record and on his war record , the judgement can be safely passed: ‘A Nazi but a sportsman’.”

  After the Axis retreat across the Mediterranean, combat actions in the Sahara ceased. Although the war resulted in untold loss of life on all sides, including local civilians caught up in the terrible drama, once hostilities concluded life in the Sahara returned more or less to the pre-war status quo, with France and Britain still the region’s major powers. Only Italian Libya moved quickly towards independence, which it attained in 1951 at the behest of the recently founded United Nations. For the other Saharan nations, foreign rule remained, for now, the norm.

  Heaven and Hell - Independence and Since

  As one of the world’s best-known franchises, it should come as no surprise that there is a branch of al-Qaeda active in the Sahara. The actual size of al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, or AQIM, is unknown but it is clear that certain criminal groups with no connection to al-Qaeda happily claim to operate in their name; the region’s governments are likewise delighted to proclaim that local disturbances are actually the work of an international terror network, especially when this is untrue. Al-Qaeda is not the first terrorist organization to find the isolation of the Sahara ideal for setting up and running training camps - Colonel Gaddafi once welcomed the Irish Republican Army and other such groups to Libya.

  Against the backdrop of what is customarily known as the War on Terror, al-Qaeda also operates in the Saharan political environment about which the West is broadly ignorant. Certain Saharan regimes are able to capitalize on this disconnect to secure funding that allows them to crack down not only on al-Qaeda but also on innocent domestic groups that have genuine grievances about abundant levels of corruption, or the lack of representation and absence of investment in desert communities. The seeds for such problems were sowed when independence came to the Sahara.

  Despite the fact that the strongest, or at least longest, resistance to the European invasions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came from the desert inhabitants, nationalist movements only really flourished in the region’s cities. The drive towards independence was hence not so acute in the desert, where people always lived somewhat independent of the outside world. When, in the decades after the Second World War, those European nations that in one form or another controlled Saharan territory decided to leave, they tended to do so without any consultation with their Saharan subjects. Since independence the political experience of the region has been a mixed lot, with border disputes, coups and wars marking long periods of turmoil. At the same time, although certain regional tensions persist hostilities forecast by the jeremiads have usually failed to break out.

  As mentioned in the last chapter, the last Saharan nation to be colonized, Libya,
was the first to gain independence. This was followed by independence for Morocco, Sudan, Tunisia, and self-government for Egypt, in 1956; Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger in 1960; Algeria in 1962; and almost for Western Sahara in 1975 when Spain unilaterally declared it was giving up all claims to the region and leaving with almost immediate effect.

  Libya’s destiny was made clear through a 1949 declaration by the nascent United Nations, which stated that the country must be fully independent within three years. Just 25 months later - in spite of an attempt on the part of the Soviet Union to secure a mandate over the country - on 24 December 1951 Libya declared its independence as a constitutional and hereditary monarchy with Idris as king, becoming in the process the first country to gain independence through the United Nations. Maintaining the ancient administrative division of the country into the provinces of Cyrenaica, Tripolitania and Fezzan allowed for greater provincial autonomy, which suited the Saharan Fezzanis perfectly.

  Under King Idris, amicable relations between Libya and the West were the norm, with first Britain and then the United States signing agreements allowing them to have military bases there, as well as using certain demarcated zones in the Sahara as firing ranges. In return, Libya received economic and military aid from the UK and the USA. Later, after the discovery of significant oil deposits in the Libyan Sahara, the balance of power changed somewhat, with Libya now viewing itself as less of a third-world nation and more on a par with the economically developed western powers. Yet in spite of its becoming rich, alienation among the people was widespread, especially for those living in the desert where the oil - and later gas - was being extracted, while the locals saw even fewer benefits than most people living in the towns and cities of the Mediterranean littoral.