immutable.
Our feelings were expressed by the man who said that we ought to fuck off.
‘If they can send one Wellington to bomb the bloody airfield why not send six, knock shit out of it, even if they only get the runways, and save us getting our feet wet.’
But although we were unappreciative, the arrival of the Wellington was very opportune and it coincided with the explosion of our own first lot of bombs which we had planted in the crates outside the workshops.
We were in among the coastal batteries now. It was a place in which to move warily. If you fell into one of the trenches which linked them you could easily break your neck. Fortunately they were deserted. Everyone was in the casemates and in spite of the din of the air raid we could hear the mumbling and rumbling of conversation inside. The occupants were the coastal gunners, and probably the infantry as well, who should have been manning the trenches and machine-gun emplacements; all of them prudently keeping their heads down.
It was here, among the trenches that we lost Sergeant Dunbar who had been bringing up the rear of the retreat. One moment he was with us, the next he was gone and it was not until some days later that we found out what had happened to him. He had trodden on what he thought was terra firma, but was really nothing but a camouflaged groundsheet which a number of Italian soldiers had erected over an open strongpoint so that they could play cards without showing a light (not all of them had taken refuge under concrete) and he had fallen through it on to their makeshift table and in the ensuing struggle had been wounded and overpowered. It was lucky for the rest of us that there seemed to be no communication between the defenders of the airfield and those on the coast who did not appear to have been alerted to what was going on at all.
By the time we reached the wire the Wellington had droned away and it had begun to rain. There was no time to waste if we were to get back to the submarine before it submerged, which it was due to do in just over three-quarters of an hour. But while we were trapped in the middle of the entanglement we saw a party of men walking along the beach on the seaward side of it and they saw us, too.
There were about a dozen of them and it was obvious that they had seen us, because when they were opposite us they stopped and, literally, put their heads together. The effect was both alarming and comical. We must have had the same effect on them, frozen in the attitudes in which they had discovered us, most of us hooked on the wire, some of us, although they could not see this, with the rings of Mill’s grenades between our teeth, wondering whether to pull the pins and chuck them, or wait and see what happened. (How I prayed that the hothead who had returned the fire of the Italian outside the workshops would not do this. If he did we would never get off alive.) But they must have been as reluctant as we were to start any trouble, because, after what seemed an eternity, they turned round and went off southwards along the shore in the direction from which they had come, and no doubt they reported that they had seen nothing out of the ordinary in the course of what was probably a routine patrol. Both parties had had a very lucky escape.
Our route back to the beach had been so roundabout that when we finally emerged from the wire on the foreshore we were not sure whether the place where we had buried the canoes was to the north or south of us. I wondered why, if we had been travelling roughly south-east, as we all thought we had, we had not crossed the dark lane from the farm to the airfield or, failing that, had not seen the sunken field with the horse in it if the boats were now to the north of us. But as we were all reluctant to go in the same direction as the enemy, even an enemy as pusillanimous as they had been, we turned left, which was north, walking in the sea, so that we should be less visible from the blockhouses. And while we were splashing along the edge of the surf which was heavier now, the wind having freshened, there was a succession of glares and heavy thuds inland as the pylon charges and those in the haversacks, perhaps the whole lot of them, went up. It was now twelve-thirty on the morning of the twelfth. At home in a few hours, as George reminded us, grouse shooting would be beginning.
Luckily we were heading in the right direction and soon we found the canoes, or rather the place where we had cut the wire. It was fortunate that we had met the patrol where we did, otherwise they would have gone on and seen the hole in the wire and this would have been something that they could not possibly have ignored. They were going to have some difficulty in explaining why they hadn’t seen it, anyway.
Now we dug up the canoes. What had been George’s and Sergeant Dunbar’s was in such bad shape, having been smashed against the side of the submarine while it was being launched, that we decided to abandon it and after we had punctured the flotation bags and had made an unsuccessful attempt to sink it, I took George into my canoe. We were now three men to a two-man canoe and we had some difficulty in getting into it once we were through the surf and when we did there was very little freeboard.
It was now a quarter to one and there were only fifteen minutes left before Una was due to submerge. We paddled the two canoes off on the back bearing, occasionally flashing a hooded torch which was a terribly risky thing to do and might have imperilled the submarine if there had been a patrol boat offshore; but we could think of nothing now beyond being picked up and saving our skins.
But we were not picked up. By the following year a homing device had been produced which was used successfully in the Far East and with which we would have been able to find her. As it was, in the rain and darkness, we never saw her. We must have gone out and beyond her, probably passing quite close, and then the north-east wind and the tidal stream, which was setting southwest, must have taken us down to leeward of her.
By three in the morning there was a nasty sea running and shortly afterwards my canoe filled with water and we had to abandon it; and although we tried to get the flotation bags out of the bow and stern, which would have been a great help in keeping us afloat, we were not able to do so. The other canoe, with Desmond and Duffy in it, was not in much better condition, and if any of us had tried to hold on to it in such weather it would have gone too.
It was very dark, the water was surprisingly cold and I was very frightened, more frightened than I had ever been. What upset me more than anything, quite irrationally, was the thought that if we drowned – which seemed more than probable – none of our people would ever know what had happened to us and why.
I had just succeeded in getting my boots off when I saw George swimming away into the darkness, and I knew immediately that he was doing so because he felt that he could not keep afloat much longer and did not want to be a burden to the rest of us. He was not a strong swimmer and he had no spare flesh on him to combat the cold.
I was the only one who saw this and I went after him and persuaded him to come back, after a fantastic conversation in the sea of which I shall never forget the gist but have completely forgotten the actual words which passed between us; all I can remember was that he was very calm and determined, just as Captain Oates must have been, walking out of that tent in the Antarctic; but eventually he swam back with me and Desmond insisted on getting out of his canoe and giving George his place, which was difficult to do but undoubtedly saved George’s life.
Now we tried to swim shorewards to where we thought the mouth of the Simetto River ought to be. If we could only reach the right bank before dawn we might be able to lie up among the trees until nightfall and then make the rendezvous for the second night with the submarine, by Capo Campolato, six miles to the south. But although by first light the wind died away, we never reached the mouth of the river or the rendezvous. It was a pity because, at great risk, Pat brought Una back three nights running to wait for us although he and his crew having seen the explosions on the airfield and heard the shooting, were more or less convinced that we were captured or dead.
Of the fourteen merchant ships which took part in Operation Pedestal, five reached Malta, including the tanker Ohio, which was enough to save it. The remaining nine were all sunk, at least four of them by J.U.88s operating from Sicily on August the twelfth and thirteenth. Operation Whynot is not one on which I look back with either pride or pleasure. The fishermen took us in to Catania where we were surrounded by a hastily assembled escort, and marched, presumably for the edification of the inhabitants, bootless and in the few clothes which remained to us – some of us were without trousers – up past palaces and convents, some of them like those