* Tobruk on the
Day of the Attack

TODAY THE ATTACK finally comes.
It is the long-expected "flap."

It begins quietly enough elsewhere on
the front. But, for our little unit of Amer-
icans, its opening is violent and dramatic.
Our camp is dive-bombed. It is our first
bombing. And one's first bombing, as we've
so often been told, is the worst.

The day starts like any other. We get
up as the sun peers above the desert hori-
zon, get our mug of tea, piece of bread and
margarine at the camp kitchen. Everything
is very still. Occasionally we hear the clank
of metal being hammered by the men work-
ing at the mobile workshop. Somebody calls
from one dugout to another. In the camp
kitchen the rations for lunch are being sorted
and cans of peaches and milk are being
opened. They are soaking some dehydrated
potatoes in water, part of Jerry's supplies
captured after a British advance.

A few of the ambulances have been sent
on the Bardia run. One or two have been
sent to Field Hospitals but the cases they
carry are mostly bad dysentery or uncon-
trollable desert sores. I don't feel much like
photographing anything, and I sit in the
canteen where it is not so hot. Out of
sheer boredom, I eat a can of pineapple
cubes.

Then I walk over to the mud and stone
but being used as the Field Service GHQ
and try and find out if there's any news.
There isn't. The boys are filling out the
endless British army paper reports about
strength of personnel, number of vehicles,
ration requirements.

After lunch I go to my dugout, rearrange
my kit and take a nap. When I wake up
it is suppertime. Walking to the mess tent
I notice that my shadow is about twenty-
five feet long. The lighting at this time of

day is wonderful because the sun's rays are
soft and if you expose your negative for the
shadows you do not overexpose the sun-
lighted part of the picture. I stop and take
some pattern shots of a pile of Eyetie am-
munition not yet hauled away by the Sap-
pers.

The rations are as dreary as ever, bully
beef stew made with dehydrated potatoes.
The tea tastes salty as a result of some-
thing's having gone wrong with the Tobruk
sea water distillery. The dessert is two slices
of canned peaches but the cook has spoiled
it by adding canned milk and the resulting
mess has curdled.

Peter Glenn of Greenville, Miss., has
come in from a run over to Bir Hachiem
and says there was a tank battle near
Knightsbridge and that the MP's were tell-
ing drivers that the El Adam road is closed.
It is probably one of those rumors that fly

This is what the camera reveals when a war photographer opens his camera shutter while Jerry drops his "stuff". The flare near the ground is an exploding bomb. Streaks are the ack ack tracer bullets.

MARCH 1944

During the bombing and shelling, AFS ambulance drivers pick up wounded at the Advanced Dressing Stations, evacuate them to the Field Hospitals. AFS men have distinguished themselves in World War II just as they did in World War I.

A British tar chats with one of the wounded while the invasion barge is being filled. This is one link in war's reverse supply line. For these soldiers the war is over. By ambulance, train, airplane, hospital ship, they go.

about at the front, so those of us think who are listening to him.

I walk over to talk with Syd, the Liverpool tinsmith of the workshop crew. He has just finished his supper and is lighting his pipe. He is so English you can almost see the little cottage, hedge and garden around him. There's a festive sparkle in his eyes when he looks at you.

We wipe out our mess tins with one of the little white bags, that litter the desert, and which once contained little transparent squares used to explode Eyetie, or Jerry plane, artillery shells. I get my cot out of the dugout and meet Syd at the mobile workshop — which is a truck with portable metal work benches and machines spread around it. At the junk heap, nearby, I find a piece of metal out of which Syd cuts an inch-wide strip to reinforce the broken leg of my cot. He is a fine workman.

As he is drilling holes in it for the wood screws, we hear a faint buzzing sound. Moving across the ridge are planes droning steadily.

"Going home" says Syd looking up for a moment and continuing the drilling. "The old RAF going back for their tea. Good blokes, the RAF lads, they won the Battle of Britain."

The blacksmith, his foot moving the belts of the forge, looks up from a red hot piece of metal he's heating and mutters: "Famous last words in the Western Desert, 'It's all right, they're RAF planes.'"

Syd chuckles. He decides to make two metal braces for the broken cot leg, one for each side. Then, in the distance we hear the interrupted buzz-a-buzz, buzz-a-buzz, the danger signal in the Western Desert. It is the identifying sound of Eyetie.

"Oh ho," says Syd, "something's up. We'll have a good look. Watch for 'em coming out of the sun. They like to come at you out of the sun."

Sure enough, out of the sun they come, like a great flock of birds. You feel danger, you smell danger, you hear danger. It is thick in the air. It is like the sound of a locomotive gaining speed. The time has come, the time has come. This is it, this is it. Then terror. You feel pulled in all directions. But there is no escape. You stand transfixed, earthbound.

"What do we do?" I say to Syd. Some rigid paralysis seems to have taken hold of my body. I am here in the midst of danger, yet I am also far away.

"Take cover," he says, pausing to take a quick pull on his pipe.

He takes me by the arm and together we run to a nearby dugout. We have to push our way inside, for two Tommies are gaping at the approaching flock of birds, to get a last split-second gander.

"Get away from that opening," Syd yells

14

THE VILLAGER

to the two curious Tommies, "don't you blokes know pilots can see faces lookin' at 'em bettern' anything?"

Just as the Tommies back into the dugout, making way for Syd and me, I can't resist glancing upward. One of the birds drops out of the formation and dives straight for me. The sound drills into my spine. It is a roar like the grinding gears of creation.

Inside the dugout, huddled with five other men, I find myself trembling and grasping my sun helmet in my hands. Boom. The dust churns up inside our little six by six cradle in the earth. The sides of the dugout shake. BOOM. This is serious. BOOM. Why, they want to kill us all! BOOM. They're dropping those things just anywhere. BOOM. They mean to destroy us. BOOM. Don't they know we don't mean any harm? BOOM. Why, they can't do this to me. BOOM. But they do.

Time begins moving backward through my life. My jobs in New York, college, prep school, the big house in Toledo, the little house on Scottwood Ave., the rented house on Winthrop St., the birth of my little brother.

BOOM. One of the men is groaning. Automatically, I begin an Our Father and speak the words out loud. But it is hard to keep my mind on the words. I stop and flinch as the explosions sound. Thy Kingdom come Thy Will be . . . I am thinking that dust is getting in my hair. Yesterday morning, at the hospital, an orderly let me have a basin of fresh clean water. I washed my hair and my face and then my hands. I felt clean for the first time since I came into the desert. Now my sun helmet is off. The churning dust is grinding into my scalp. I'm getting dirty again.

BOOM. Will there be any pain if one of the bombs drops into our dugout? Perhaps it will be all over without my knowing that it hit and I will never know when I die. It is silent. It is such a long silence.

"Stay in here, Jim," Syd calls out. "You bloody fool."

"It's the blacksmith," a voice at the mouth of the dugout yells out. "'E's been hit. 'E's lying there and I'm . . ." The voice trails off. That voice is a Tommy who's gone out to help a comrade.

We file out of the dugout. Outside we are unable to see more than a few feet ahead. Billowing dust from the explosions is still settling to earth.

The blacksmith is being led to the South African Field Hospital. His whole arm is covered with blood. He was in the London Blitz and takes his bombings casually. When the Stukas came he merely stepped behind a truck. Shrapnel pierces automobile bodies as easily as tissue paper. One piece has put a hole clean through the truck's engine.

Suddenly, I remember that it might be a good idea to take some pictures! But it's a little late, and the light is dead, so I make

just a few shots of the bomb craters and the damage done to the vehicles.

Like everyone else, I am infected by excited elation. The Tommies and the Americans are talking and comparing notes on what they did and said and felt while the bombs were dropping. Everyone seems anxious to make it clear that he was scared to death. One of our rookies, it seems, who had been through Coventry, went berserk. He shook his fists at the planes and wanted the pilots to come down and fight him. He'd stop in the middle of his ravings and say he was sorry but he couldn't help it. He was taken to Tobruk Hospital.

Two South African doctors tell me they were having a Scotch and soda when the stuff dropped. A piece of shrapnel went through their portable radio but it kept on playing. They dropped on their bellies on the tent floor. The shrapnel shattered the highball glass on the officer's table and the liquid dripped on his neck. He says he

kept worrying about the good Scotch going to waste. A captured Jerry petrol tin they were using to store water in was turned inside out by the shrapnel. Their tent is riddled with holes.

We all try to figure out why the Jerry pilot went for our camp. A stick of about thirty bombs was dropped right through the middle of the area we are occupying. But a big red cross on the ground clearly marks our camp. Tops of ambulances and other vehicles are also marked with a red cross. Why waste good bombs on us?

All we can figure out is that the crane of one of the wrecking trucks, which is camouflaged poorly, looked like an anti-aircraft gun emplacement. However, there were no direct hits on either dugouts or vehicles. The gasoline dump which is next to the workshop would have made a fine show if it had been hit. No one is seriously injured. I get someone to photograph Syd, myself and two of the Tommies who were in the dugout

South African stretcher bearers remove a wounded British Tommy from an AFS ambulance. The South African Parliament voted that natives should be allowed to engage only in non-combatant work in the war. Natives are very gentle with wounded.

MARCH 1944

15

with me during the bombing. We are all grinning.

All during the night, Jerry keeps up his bombing. We learn later he was setting off British mine fields with dive bombers. All night long we hear the buzz-a-buzz, buzz-a-buzz. Alone in my dugout I try to think clearly. Why did I ever get into this? But just this sort of thing was what I thought I wanted to experience. But to be asking for death by being here seems silly. The sounds of the Jerry motors, the thud of the bombs, the continual explosions, they are becoming pains in my body. Am I a coward? Am I afraid to die? Certainly I don't want to die. It's not a question of being afraid to die.

I want to get out of this mess and live. I want to live and take more pictures and do another book and have a wife and babies. This is no place to die. Think of being buried in one of those desert mounds with only a wooden cross at your head andcorpions eating at your body. Think of the wind levelling off your grave so that no one would ever find it. I want to be buried in the New England hills, near my Connecticut farm, or in Toledo next to Father's grave. I want to be buried in my own land, under green sod, and know that the seasons change and snow and spring come and go overhead.

Perhaps I would feel differently if I were here for some other reason than taking pictures for magazines, taking pictures so that people looking at them can get a vicarious thrill out of seeing what war is like from a Morris chair. Taking pictures so that circulation will increase and advertising salesmen can get more ads and the advertising rate will go up. If I were here with a gun in my hand, fighting for my country, then that might make some sense. If I were charging at someone I hated with a bayonet or behind a machine gun pumping bullets into the enemy, that would give me something to do. But would I like this killing? Whom do I hate? Who are these men who are fighting and killing? Who are these men who are trying to kill us? We don't know them. Would I kill them if I faced them now? Would I?

My thoughts, I realize, are getting the better of me. This is not healthy. I go over to Mort's dugout. He and several other Americans are sitting up talking. Only occasionally do they make some mention of the incessant bombing outside. They are all smoking nervously. But I can't seem to enter in. I keep visualizing those pilots overhead with their goggles on, pulling at levers that may at any moment send a bomb

right on top of me. I curse my damned imagination.

I go to another dugout, and another, but nobody is saying what he thinks or what I think he is thinking. They are all talking and keeping their minds off the danger, off death.

Finally, I duck into a dugout just as a Jerry flare drops on our camp. It lights up everything just like the front of a Broadway moviehouse sprayed with Kleig lights on an opening night. Inside, are two Tommies who are sitting on their cots, their heads buried in their hands.

One of them says nothing, just looks up at me, but in his eyes is a terror that I remember having once seen on the face of a child whose mother was striking him on the face in a violent fit of temper. The other Tommy is talking in a kind of grumbling fashion half to himself. Here I will stay. Here are two human beings who are as terrorized and bewildered as I. They cannot help but understand whatever I do or say. I can speak my thoughts if I like.

But I don't speak my thoughts. I listen to the Tommy's thoughts. Listening to him, I forget myself.

"I didn't want to come," he is saying, "they made me. I was called up. Me old man said, 'Don't go. Don't let them do to you what they did to me? Me old man who came back from the last war, crippled and paralyzed so he could never do another day's work. Me old lady spent her whole life supportin' him and me and the two other kids, too. I don't want to fight. I don't want to be here scared to death all the time. Listen to the bombin' outside. It's goin' on all night."

The other Tommy lights a cigarette, but the articulate Tommy says:

"Put that cigarette out. Don't you know they can see a light miles up in the sky from an airplane?"

The bombing is more in the distance now. I feel better. Perhaps if I go back to my dugout I can sleep. Walking back, a sentry calls and tells me I really ought to stay underground, especially if I'm without a tin hat. The bloody ack-ack shrapnel, he says, is popping everywhere and if piece hits your head it sinks right in.

In my dugout, I go quietly to sleep. Only occasionally, do I awaken when there is an especially loud explosion. If I'm going to get it I'm going to get it. The thought seems to comfort me.

This is what happens when a bomb lands too close to an AFS ambulance. War shows no favoritism.

THE VILLAGER

TOBRUK HARBOR

planks. The South African natives carry
the wounded men on stretchers to an in-
vasion barge operated by a gasoline engine.
I jump aboard the barge and, while it is
being loaded, get some good studies of the
patients. Getting good shots of wounded
soldiers is not easy. Most of them are cov-
ered up to their necks with blankets, thereby
covering generally any visual evidence of their
wounds. The best picture I get is the burned
and wounded tank commander as he lies on
his stretcher on the barge in the sun. His
face is scarred by burns, and his arms are
outside the blanket. One arm and hand are
entirely black; the other hand clutches his
wallet and family photographs.

The barge takes off from the pier and
weaves it way through the sunken ship hulls
that fill the harbor. Eighty-seven hulls have
gone to the bottom of the harbor since the
war. The hospital ship is anchored at the
mouth of the harbor. I get some good shots
of the crane hoisting the coffin-like box hold-

ing two stretchers and men, aboard the ship. While I am making one of these shots, I trip on a ridge protruding from the steel deck of the invasion barge. Fortunately, I catch my Rolleflex in my hands and hold it as I fall, but my right knee takes the full impact of my weight. The skin is broken, and the swelling starts immediately.

The barge returns to the pier for the next load of patients. I get some more shots of the wounded men being unloaded from the AFS ambulances. Some are "walking patients." There are some blinded men, and a General who came up to the front three days ago and immediately caught dysentery. Then I hitch a ride up to the hospital to get my knee treated. The treatment consists of having the area of the cut painted with a triple-dye solution. One of the dyes is gentian violet, and the solution has been extremely helpful, the MO says, in the desert. It was originally discovered by a Boston physician, who used it very successfully in

The barge moves out of the hull-gutted harbor past a bomb-shattered Tobruk marine building, part of Mussolini's once magnificent African "dream Empire". The hospital ship Llondhovery Castle lies anchored at the harbor's mouth.

This morning I catch one of the last ambulances in the AFS convoy, which is taking wounded out of Tobruk Hospital to the pier at the harbor. Johnny Meeker of Englewood, New Jersey, is the driver. In civil life he was a broker on Wall Street, and was fairly successful at money making. As he neared forty, he came to hate the work of buying and selling stocks and bonds because he got no feeling of accomplishment, no feeling of doing good out of it. Now he tells me, he is happier than he can ever remember having been. Now he knows he can look back on life, and remember having helped out a few sick and wounded fellow men.

We pick up four cases at Tobruk Hospital. The hospital orderlies load them into our ambulance carefully. A Nursing Sister says good-bye to each man. Her unit of English Nursing Sisters has won the respect of all the men on the desert front because these women have stayed at Tobruk throughout the bombing and have done a splendid job of caring for the wounded men at the hospital.

Our four cases are: a badly burned tank commander; a silicosis case, which probably means TB; a man whose right arm is swollen with desert sores; and a bad case of dysentery. The idea of this evacuation of wounded is to clear out the sick who won't get well, and those whose wounds are too difficult to treat at the front.

As our ambulance approaches the pier, it stops four hundred yards away until the ambulance ahead of us has unloaded. The idea is to have no bunching of vehicles at the pier in case of aerial attack. Husky South African natives are on hard serving as stretcher bearers. They are smiling and gentle, and walk smoothly to avoid jolting the injured patients. The South African Parliament, I remember, has passed a law that native troops may only do war work that does not involve the use of firearms.

The area around the harbor is the most badly bombed part of Tobruk. The buildings are modern, having been constructed of cement block and plaster, with concrete roofs. Now their jumbled remains are like something out of surrealistic dreams. The power house next to the pier, where we are unloading wounded, has been partly destroyed, but the Sappers have put some of the machinery into operation. Three Tommies in shirts and shorts are mending an engine when I go inside to take a shot of the harbor through a blasted window. They look up, completely puzzled, at why I am standing on a work table weaving like a blind man until I get what I want in my ground glass. That's one of the troubles with being a photographer: trying to get your effects makes you look like a crazy man doing insane antics.

The pier is concrete, and has also been
thoroughly blasted, but the Sappers have
made it usable by repairing it with wooden

MARCH 1944

17

treating burns. Here in the desert, cuts and sores do not heal readily. Dust and sand seem to keep them infected. The triple-dye solution makes a kind of crust that protects the wound. Many of the sores are infected by strange Middle East and desert virii that completely bewilder the doctors. Generally, when a man gets a sore that won't heal and it gets progressively worse, the doctors label it an Aleppo sore. This virus is believed to have originated in the town of Aleppo, in northern Syria. It occurs to me again that the lands of the Middle East and North Africa also do not welcome the men from the west.

A deep drousiness has taken hold of me. The orderly lets me lie down in a vacant officer's room, and I take a long nap. It is the end of the afternoon when I awaken. I walk out into the quadrangle of the hospital, and get acquainted with two orderlies who are off duty. They are delighted to meet an American and invite me to supper. It is a very special supper, because they have been hiding cans of various delicacies in the bottom bureau drawer of the eye doctor's interviewing room. To cook the meal they use a burner meant to boil water for disinfecting instruments. We have canned sausage, Heinz baked beans, a tin of captured Eyetie sardines, and a can of Australian peaches. Afterwards, we walk down to the Mediterranean for a swim. We follow the old Turkish wall which stretches from the hospital, about a mile down to the sea. Tobruk used to be the outpost of the Ottoman Empire. The Italians have put the wall into pretty good shape. Half way down, they have built a set of Roman gates. Here and there are turrets meant to hold a single soldier with

a musket. The wall is completely useless for modern warfare, but nonetheless there are many destroyed sections and holes in it where bombs or shells from this war inadvertently hit it. On some of the stones, Italian masons have carved the Fascist emblem. I photograph the wall, and get some pictures of destroyed artillery and vehicles lying beside it. The orderlies advise me to duck my camera when we pass a big, well-camouflaged British coastal defense gun.

The shore where we are to swim is covered with land mines and strung with a network of barbed wire. A sign says: LAND MINES BEWARE. We walk through a three foot wide lane in the barbed wire down to the beach. The water is cool and blue. The sun is dropping to the horizon, and has lost its intensity. The light is soft.

Everybody is swimming without suits. Without their uniforms, the soldiers suddenly cease their robot sameness. They seem like country boys at a swimming hole. It is quiet, except for the lapping of waves against the rocks. From a distance we hear the shouts from the spectators of a rugby match between a tank unit and an infantry unit. For a little while there is the illusion of peace and gladness.

Back at the hospital it is dark. An oil tanker has come in, and the Jerry planes are trying to drop one on her. The searchlights and anti-aircraft barrage go up. Bombs explode around the edge of the harbor. I set my Rolleflex on a tripod, open the aperture up wide, and focus on the fourth of July celebration over the harbor. I keep the shutter open about a minute for each exposure. I know the lighted tracer bullets will make nice streaks on the negatives, and

the bursting bombs will make semi-circle flares. The buildings and vehicles will be in silhouette. These will be good night pictures.

I spend the night in the dormitory for orderlies, and in the morning have breakfast in the troops' mess with my two friends of the night before. As we are sipping our tea, one of them says,

"Understand we'll 'ave a lot of tie up this mornin'. Yesterday and last night were bad."

"Just what do you guys do?" I say,

"Oh," my friend answers, "we're on the morgue detail. We go about the wards in the morning and pick up the dead ones, take 'em to the morgue room and tie up their hands and feet. We wrap up 'is belongings and take off his identification discs. He's buried in one. One goes home, the third goes to the War Office. The padre 'elps us."

"You mean," I say, taking a good swig of my tea, "that you fellows bury the dead?"

"Oh, no," my friend says, "the cemetery detail does that. We just get them ready. They stay out at the cemetery diggin' the graves and gettin' the crosses ready."

"Perhaps," I say, "you can tell me something I've heard from soldiers but never believed. I understand in the British Army that when a private dies or gets killed he is charged three shillings and six pence for the blanket he is buried in."

"That's right," he says. "We sew 'em up in a blanket to bury 'em. When they add up his pay book to settle with his widow, they deduct for money 'e's 'ad advanced to 'im and take out three and six for the blanket. It's routine."

## PHOENIX UP FROM ASHES

As phoenixes up from ashes gray,
Amnesiacs waken on a day
And soon remember;
The snowbird sings a happy lay
Through dead December,
A phoenix up from ashes gray.

Does Beauty spring from ugly scars
Or only cover
With Flanders poppies after wars,
And purple clover?

A phoenix up from ashes gray,
The Emperor moth on carrion
Is beauty-fed,
As silver mould will thrive on dung,
Dew-diamonded,
A phoenix up, and ashen gray.

The Red-buds for Iscariot
In hangtree lodge.
And what is of the essence, what
Is camouflage?

The Phoenix rose from ashes gray.
(Was it the ashes flew away,
O who remembers?)
And what on a World will Beauty lay
That dies in embers...
Or raise from the ashes gray?

Annis Cox

THE VILLAGER

18