A Spitfire Pilot - Part 31
Souk-el-Arba
The next day we scarcely seemed to have been in bed for more than five minutes when we were all called to get up and get packed. Well getting packed wouldn’t normally have taken long because we scarcely had anything with us, but in the pitch dark we had to fumble about the bedroom, finding bits and pieces, stuffing them in our parachute bags and coming down into the cold morning. We were put in trucks and taken back to Bone and told to go off and do a sweep over Beja, which at that time was in enemy hands. We did this, didn’t hit anything, didn’t see anything and were told to land at a place called Souk-el-Arba on the way back. We were told that we’d recognise the landing field at Souk-el-Arba because there was a crashed Potez or some such bomber, smack in the middle of it.
Anyway we found it alright, we all landed but it was like landing on the moon. It was rough, hard mud with the usual dust and potholes and we wondered how long our tyres would last. The town of Souk-el-Arba, or large village, was at one end of the aerodrome and a road with ditches either side, ran from the town right through the middle of the aerodrome. So we parked our aircraft on one side of the ditch, went to the other and just stood around.
During the day some ground troops arrived, together with supplies of petrol and ammunition, and having nowhere else to store it, we piled all the four-gallon petrol cans in the ditches alongside the road that ran from the little town of Souk-el-Arba, straight through the aerodrome. The cans were theoretically hidden under the trees, but there was really nowhere else to put the things.
We were given boxes of K Rations but we had nowhere to sleep and no clothes. We managed to dig out some rather poor tents from the French and also managed to scrounge a couple of paper-like blankets. Now although the weather was very nice during the day, pleasantly warm, the minute the sun went down, which was normally about 5 o’clock, when everything went completely black. It was freezing, and we crawled to bed and woke up shivering like mad. We managed to scrounge a few more blankets, but even so it wasn’t too warm at night and we continued like this for something like a fortnight.
Water was another problem. We’d go into the village and fill our water bottles from the bowser and then put in the little pills we were given to keep us clear of diseases and so on, but there was not enough water to wash in and consequently, after a few days, we were a bit scruffy.
We were kept pretty busy right from the start and on 21st November, I took part in three sweeps and one aerodrome patrol, totalling five and a half hours, which is quite a lot of flying, one way and another. On one of the sweeps, we came across some enemy lorries in the middle of nowhere, they had no air cover or anything, so we piled in and started shooting them up, but I must admit the old Germans are a bit quick off the mark. No sooner had we made our first approach, than one lot had piled out of their lorry, set up a machine-gun and were returning fire like mad. We clobbered them pretty well, but they managed to hit Bob Oxspring’s aircraft and he crash-landed on the way back, near Beja.