I was watching Michael Palin’s Sahara the other day and in his trip the Monty Python-veteran comes across a group of veterans in Libya remembering the siege of Tobruk, where a garrison of allied troops held the vital Mediterranean port against Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Palin, normally the one telling the stories, finds someone here with a great story of his own. In the book that goes with the television series, available in print or online at his website, Palin introduces this man as follows:
I find myself sitting next to a smart, tweed-jacketed man called Ray Ellis, with thick white hair and a ruddy face. His regiment, the South Nottinghamshire Hussars, were trapped by the Germans in a corner of bleak desert known, ironically, as the Knightsbridge Box. They had already been in the desert for a year, without a day’s leave, when, under heavy attack, they were given orders ‘to fight until the last drop of ammo’. Ray it was who fired the last shot, before being captured, taken to Tripoli
From the extras of the TV series I’ve transcribed mr. Ellis’ story:
I was taken prisoner at Knightsbridge where all these men died. And then we were dragged across—I say dragged because it is too long and too horrible a story to relate at this time—dragged across the desert all the way to Tripoli. Many men died on the way of dysentery, starvation and that sort of things.[...] We had to march for water. And many men died on the way. They didn’t die of thirst because the Germans mercifully shot them as they fell to the floor. They dispatched them so they didn’t die of thirst. That wasn’t being cruel, that was being kind.
Then we were dragged all the way to Tripoli and then we went across to Naples on a cargo ship in the bottom of the hull, buttoned down and praying. It was the most frightening journey I ever made in my life, afraid of being sunk by the RAF or the Royal Navy. [..] We were a dirty, lousy, filthy, unshaven, thin, begrimed group of men. In this way they marched us through the streets as propaganda: this is the British army. And the population were cheering and mocking and I hated them. I was full of hatred.
But then something happened that has been with me for all my life. A girl came from the back of the crowd and put a peach in my hand. It was… it was fantastic. And all my life afterwards when things are being bad, I have always thought: somewhere there’s girl with a peach. Someone with another idea, another thought, who isn’t following the general trend. And as I said, that girl with the peach has stayed with me for all my life.
I find it a wonderful story illustrating not only a different kind of war from what we know from the eastern front—but I also find it amazing how little events like these are so powerful they survive for decades and are told even today, be it with mixed emotions. I hate to think of how many stories like this remain unrecorded and will soon be forever forgotten.
