With Paddy joining us, the crew had a League of Nations look about it: four Scots, one Irish and me. Friendships were developing too, from living in close proximity with other crews. Among the gun commanders, Jimmy Irvine, a sergeant from the same regiment as Topper, Archie and Bert, was almost inevitably drawn towards my bunch. In a praiseworthy attempt to prevent boredom before it set in, the powers decided that some of the flat plain below our gun positions should be cleared of vines and levelled to provide a football pitch. It was a job which was tackled with more enthusiasm than might have been expected, considering the limited tools at our disposal, but it produced an excellent example of teamwork between the Partisans, commandos and RSR, and we found an enhanced camaraderie in toiling together. The resultant, grassless, full-size pitch provided countless hours of pleasure (and sometimes fury), but I also think it clinched somebody’s notion of the potential for building a rough airstrip on Vis.
Royal Air Force advisers had been on the island since January, and early discussions had taken place between Brigadier Fitzroy Maclean and Randolph Churchill about Vis’ secondary potential as an ‘aircraft carrier’. I am convinced that the impressive sight of the rapidly created, level football pitch provided the final nudge for the experts to order the vines’ clearance for a narrow runway of some 1000 yards alongside the island’s only noteworthy road. We played our first football match on the new pitch on 19 March against the Commandos (43RM) who thrashed us 5-2: it was to be a week or two before the air-strip had its christening. Christening with landing planes that is.
On the night of 22/23 March Jerry decided to mark it first and so turned out to bomb it. Either the daily visitor high in the sky in a reconnaissance plane had spotted it with his camera or Sirjon’s ‘five columns’ were at work again. It was the first real air raid on the island and whilst one could expect attention to be given to the two towns of Vis and Komiza, the enemy must have known about our presence on the plateau to justify a few bombs there. I think there were casualties in the towns that night but it was by no means a heavy raid, the nearest bomb to our position falling 1000 yards away. There were probably no more than five or six planes involved. The first real air attack came a few nights later on 27/28 March when Podselje was clearly the target for up to twenty bombers, although the towns copped it too.
It was a terrifying onslaught, about which we could do nothing because the effectiveness of our Brownings was limited to 1000 yards – a fact which infuriated the Partisans who felt we should be blazing away randomly and harmlessly into the night sky, as indeed were they with their small arms, mostly sten guns with a range effective at less than 50 yards. It was the first instance of disharmony between us, about which they were totally irrational. It marked an irreconcilable difference of approach between our ‘whites of their eyes’ training in the economy of ammunition and the unnecessary revelation of our gun positions, as opposed to their principle of blazing away regardless.
Parachute flares had first been dropped to illuminate the target, after which the bombs rained down on the tiny village at will without impediment. I’m told that blanket bombings of cities breeds a fatalism from feelings of dispersal – “I’d have to be really lucky to avoid catching one out of this lot, when there’s so many of them [bombs].” When one is part of a relatively small and specific target, and a helpless, unprotected one at that, even the heathen resorts to the last line of defence – prayers – and so I did. As always in a crisis, some praiseworthy human qualities emerged. For me, the most lasting memory of that night was the work of a man I had barely been aware of before. Ray Fishwick, our seconded medical orderly, had hitherto been a mere name to me. My admiration for his dedication, knowledge and skill bordered on hero worship after that night, as he recruited us and bossed us around as assistants in tending the wounded. Out of it came the discovery of a mutual rapport, and consequently a close friendship, not at all diminished by his hometown being the other side of the Mersey – Wallasey.
Daylight – as it always does – eased our worst fears. Barely a house had escaped some damage but only three or four had disappeared after direct hits. Wisely, most of the occupants had deserted the village when the first bombs exploded, so that although most of the casualties were found on the hillside, their dispersal had prevented the toll which would have resulted from direct hits on overcrowded houses. But it was bad enough. Three RSR men had been killed, as had three Commandos and four Partisans. I have no record of the number wounded but I know that Ray was away for days whilst he helped at the hastily improvised operating theatre in a house near Komiza, which had been converted into a hospital. It is an extraordinary truth that, until the air raid, I had not given a thought to the significant absence of an RSR medical officer. Had I done so, I would firstly have dwelt on how or why he should have been with us when some of the Regiment had already been dropped into Greece to help the guerrillas there, some were still in the Middle East and some at Bari in Italy. Secondly, I would have asked whether we were attached to the 43rd Royal Marine Commando for medical services. I never knew. After the raid I cared not: Sergeant Ray Fishwick was good enough for me. Without being aware of any particular leanings of Ray’s politics, I found myself infuriated at the social system that excluded such a natural doctor from actually being able to be one because his general educational qualifications were deemed inadequate.
If the raid found for me a good friend, it also produced a bitter enemy – or rather, it confirmed one. A diminutive, mouthy Welshman, whom I shall call Thomas, had crossed my path in near conflict since our days at Ramat David. There was never anything that I remembered which justified violence – just a taunting aggression in which he saw fisticuffs as the only solution to any contrived disagreement. Only the certain knowledge that I was being provoked had postponed the bout, but my inner rage at the lout simmered at the mere sight of him. I often think that I would have done mankind a service by killing him that night, as I could easily have done without question amidst the turmoil of the raid; and I came very close to it.
Ray was treating a Partisan girl who lay on the hillside in some terrible distress, with a piece of shrapnel lodged high in her inner thigh. Two male Partisans were at her head comforting her. In response to Ray’s call, I held the leg and the torch whilst he cut the trouser leg away, baring in the process the private parts of the girl’s body. I couldn’t watch; I would like to say wholly on the grounds of decency but I knew too from Ray’s gasp that the wound was not a pleasant sight, and my squeamishness might have rendered me useless. At this point Thomas arrived on the scene and his opportunistic voyeurism produced remarks which would have been disgusting at any time or place. There and then, they were vulgar, inhuman and the antithesis of therapy to the poor girl, whose ignorance of English was no barrier to an embarrassed understanding of the leering tone of the words. I got rid of him, exchanging language that has no place in a narrative intended for my grandchildren, but I knew from the hate in my heart that the showdown was not far away. By then I was looking forward to it.
Two nights later I think I willed it to happen. There had to be a physical resolution: I knew too well that to use my rank to charge him with insolence or insubordination would have solved nothing. He’d had his usual skinful of vino and was being as objectionable as ever in the billet, whilst most of us tried to lapse into the precious sleep which was at such a premium on Vis. Resigned to the conclusion that the time had come, I did not mince words in telling him to ‘shut up’. Darkness could not obscure his instant, belligerent sparring stance at the foot of my palliasse on the floor, as with a sneering taunt he enquired about who was going to shut him up. That apt distortion of Shakespeare’s Henry VI came to mind as a maxim of self-preservation:
“Thrice armed is he who hath his quarrel just – But four times he who gets his blow in fust.”
At the same time as I announced that I was taking on the job (of shutting