Escape and Evasion Training
The high ranking officer, who had been sent from GHQ Middle East to depress us with the conduct expected of us as prisoners of war, paradoxically cheered us with the implications of imminent involvement in hostilities. It was difficult to decide whether to applaud or rebuke High Command for imposing on us so negative a subject, but I suppose in the spirit of boy-scout preparedness it had to be delivered simultaneously with the surprising issue of what was described as an escape kit. The other point in its favour was the confirmation that we were rather special. No other units that we had heard of had received items which indicated the likelihood of action behind enemy lines, which suggested a fair degree of individual independence and implied almost certain co-operation with Partisan organisations.
In logical terms, it was sheer pessimism to envisage a situation calling for any of those objects – a file, a crude compass and a map of the Balkan countries – but their issue redeemed some of GHQ’s otherwise besmirched reputation, in their concerns for our welfare. The four-inch-long file was wholly concealed in a flat, innocent looking strip of rubber, which had been designed to fit snugly in the pleat of the field dressing pocket of our battle-dress trousers in the hope of avoiding detection in the normal frisking. My trouble was that it added further rigidity and bulk to a pocket already bulging with my forbidden diary, to the point where a passing medical officer might one day suspect one of the most frightening examples of unilateral hernia he had ever diagnosed – and without the removal of the patient’s trousers at that. So I found another home for it – the file, I mean, not the diary.
The compass was at once simple, yet quite ingenious: a two-part brass trouser button (on the face of it) which obviated the need for sewing. With the two parts separated by the trouser material, the spike on one part clicked into the recess in the other, effectively locking the button in an almost irremovable position. The recessed half of the button had been magnetised and marked with a tiny luminous spot to indicate north. One simply had to place the magnetised part on the spike of the lower part to see it swivel instantly to indicate the direction of magnetic north. Useful to know in a blind trek for freedom.
The map had been printed on one side of an otherwise innocuous looking, folded field handkerchief. The unmistakeable utility of these items hardly warranted even the few words of explanation which they produced. Perhaps the promise of the future issue of gold sovereigns, as universally accepted tender for emergency purchases in countries where wartime internal fiscal and political chaos had rendered their national currency worthless, posed more questions than the speaker answered. But both speaker and recipients seemed to be reduced to embarrassed speechlessness (at least initially) by another item issued. The conjecture, the jokes and the moral sensitivity which the personal issue of a couple of packets of rubber sheath contraceptives later provoked would make an interesting book in itself. Suffice it to say that none of the escape items issued were to be ‘exposed’ before our arrival on the scene of military operations.
Morphine tablets comprised the final means of ‘escape’. We were instructed in the dosage for relieving extreme pain – and how much it would take to kill. I imagine that this was to beat the Germans to it if they appeared to be intent on carrying out Hitler’s declaration of 18 October 1942: to treat all Commando-type infiltrators in occupied countries as spies and execute them. Fortunately, his instructions were not always carried out.
The exclusivity of our unit gradually became more outwardly noticeable, with the issue of gear which advertised to all in the Haifa area that ours was a somewhat distinctive military role. Our secret existence had obviously been exposed, so what did it matter if the hitherto exclusive beige berets of the Special Air Service suddenly appeared in greater profusion? Although we had become part of a Special Services brigade, the regiment acquired its own rather eye-catching, coloured cap badge emblem depicting a winged torch, and showing the capitals RSR with the biblical legend from St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, ‘Quit you like men’. It is true that the wags and the detractors soon fastened on to the word ‘quit’ in its American usage, rather than ‘acquit’. All this, together with a Commando dagger and our smart, brown, calf-high South African Army boots (instead of the black, standard issue Army clod-hoppers) unfortunately prompted a swaggering braggadocio in some of our more aggressive types. Long before it had a military reputation, the Regiment developed an unenviable one of loutishness through aggression, vandalism, drunkenness and looting, which suggested an undisciplined rabble rather than the crème de la crème esteem which the speciality of our training claimed for us.
“Those first few nights of learning left enduring memories of terror-stricken shrieks of pain piercing the night air...”
Chapter II
Daily Life At Nahariya
After constant pressure and in a rare gesture of conciliation, the War Department decided to erect a galvanised structure around and above our latrine bench seats, so that a visit to sit over one of the roughly hewn holes in the bench became more private and less of a risk of contracting pneumonia. That we should come to curse the protection will, I know, brand us as perpetually whining denigrators of all authority. Never satisfied! It wasn’t that at all, really. It was simply that our protection from the elements simultaneously provided shelter for the scorpions, of which there were an abundance at Nahariya at that time. They seemed to like the surroundings too. It has to be regretted that the obviousness of this logic of nature was not perceived as readily as it should have been. We do tend to learn from painful experience. It took several days – or nights, more correctly – for us to learn not to sit out after dark unless in dire straits, and only then after burning off with a match or candle the scorpions invariably lurking beneath the rim of the seats. Those first few nights of learning left enduring memories of terror-stricken shrieks of pain piercing the night air, followed by silhouetted images of fast disappearing victims, scurrying over the skyline, sometimes wearing trousers, sometimes not, heading in steadfast urgency for the Medical Officer’s tent for treatment to parts normally recognised as private and vital.
I was lumbered with a fair share of guard duties at Nahariya, which in mid-January were more than somewhat onerous due to the astonishing insecurity of weapon and ammunition storage, the scattered nature of the camp site and – a rare phenomenon – the presence of the mules needed for the training of the mountain artillery battery. The wide dispersal of these sites warranted three simultaneous sentry patrols, so that it was a comparatively large guard of nine other ranks and two NCOs which was needed every 24 hours. Each sentry did two hours on, four hours off.
On one memorable night I was the junior NCO on a guard commanded by Corporal ‘Spike’ Kelly, a redoubtable character yet possessed of a puckish sense of humour. As luck would have it, or perhaps more in the spirit of comradeship and sympathy which always seemed to be directed at men on guard duty, we received a tip-off from an officer’s mess orderly, at just about dusk, that the orderly officer of the day had been drinking heavily and boasting to his fellow officers that he was going to catch the guard ‘on the hop’ that night. Thus the sentries were especially vigilant and the rest of us remained impeccably, correctly dressed, even whilst resting, as we waited the inevitable shout from the guard-tent sentry, “Guard! Turn Out!.”
It was a few minutes after midnight when the call came. I cannot imagine that anyone could ever have seen a slicker, quicker turnout despite the inky blackness of that night. With Kelly on the extreme right, six sentries and then myself on the far end in one straight line, we must have displayed a formidable challenge, even to one determined to find fault, as we presented arms with Grenadier-like precision on Spike’s command.
With the help of a tiny, weak-batteried torch he surveyed us and weighed into Spike with nebulous complaints and criticism that had obviously