Death in the Desert

One of the maths teachers at my prep school, Glengorse, had a badly scarred face. Being small boys, it intrigued us, the more so when we discovered that he had almost died in the Western Desert when his tank had been hit and 'brewed up', a horrid term which means that the tank had caught fire.

He wasn't the only teacher to have fought in the war: the headmaster had been in De Havilland Mosquitos, the history teacher in corvettes. Such information was useful in assisting us to persuade a teacher to follow a 'red herring' - that is, to talk about things which were nothing to do with the subject but, usually, far more interesting. It turned out that the maths teacher was only too happy to oblige.

One day he described ambushing German convoys. The British tanks would wait 'hull down' behind the crest of a dune and then charge down the steep slope, enabling them to get close before the Germans could retaliate with their very effective 88-millimetre anti-tank guns.

Years later, in 1963, sitting in a cafe in Tobruk while hitch-hiking back from Egypt, Michael Atkinson and I met the chaplain of the nearby British RAF air base at El Adem. He told us that the bedouin occasionally came in to report human remains they had found out in the desert, some of them British, and some still sitting in their tanks. He would then go out and collect and, if they were British, inter them in the big Commonwealth war cemetery outside Tobruk. When we asked him why it had taken twenty or more years to find them he described the math teacher's tank ambush manoeuvre and how, once brewed up, the tank would be steadily overwhelmed by the moving dune, only to appear, years later, on the upwind side, with the desiccated bodies of the crew perfectly preserved inside.

That evening, a few miles west of Tobruk, after a day of frustratingly short lifts which had left us stuck out in the desert, we had laid out our sleeping bags by the side of the road when we heard a truck approaching. We rushed out and flagged it down. It was a British one-and-a-half tonner. The driver said he was quite happy to give us a lift to Benghazi but we'd have to travel in the back. Fine, we said. OK, he replied, but there's a body in there, in a coffin. We climbed in and rolled our sleeping bags out again, this time on either side of an RAF officer who had drowned that afternoon in an accident while snorkelling.

I tell this story because the incident in Tobruk came to mind this afternoon when I had one of my sudden picture memories, of one of those desert cemeteries, high-walled to keep out the sand.

Picture of Tobruk Commonwealth cemetery courtesy

Maher A. A. Abdussalam on Wikimedia Commons.