MacElwain Prisoner in Italy  Appointments of Officers and Assignments  Transfer of Units from Syria to Western Desert  Monthly Payments to AFS Men ---Official Statement  Re-enlistment or Return ---Official Statement  FRENCH HISTORY  PERSONAL NARRATIVE  GUNS INSTEAD OF BUTTER  A DAY AT THE FRONT  Menu  The Pip Bag -- or --- Straight from the Shoulder  "What About Willie?"  "A Cargo More Precious Than Gold"

We reprint from the July issue of the NEWS BULLETIN:--

Unfortunately this work has not been accomplished without losses. May I extend deep sympathy and the sympathy of the AFS to the families of those men who have given their lives in relieving the suffering of others, and to the families of those men who are wounded, missing, or captured."

Ralph S. Richmond
Colonel, AFSS

American Field Service Middle East Casualty Lists:--

(Cairo, Aug. 19)

The following cablegram was received today from Mr. Galatti:

(AFS GHQ MEF --- Cairo, Aug. 2)

Colonel Ralph 5. Richmond, OC, AFS, announced the following appointments to take effect from August 2nd, 1942:

Captain King will act as Commanding Officer of 11 AFS Ambulance Car Company. This includes all personnel at present in Syria and in the Western Desert.

Lieutenant Marsh will, assume the rank of Captain, and will be in command of the units operating in the Western Desert.

Lieutenant Dun will act as Adjutant to Captain Marsh in the Western Desert.

Lieutenants Hoeing and. DePew will be in command of their respective Platoons, C and D, in the Western Desert.

Lieutenant Laiser will act as Field Cashier in the Western Desert.

Lieutenant Ives will assume the rank of Captain, and will be in command of the units in Syria.

Lieutenant Wyllie will act as Adjutant to Captain Ives, and also as Field Cashier in Syria.

Lieutenant Johnston will be in command of Platoon A in Syria

Lieutenant Geer will be in command of Platoon B in Syria.

Lieutenant Marx will act as liaison officer for MT and equipment.

(AFS GHQ MEF --- Cairo, Aug. 24)

John G. Goodwin appointed second lieutenant this date.

(Cairo. July 28)

In consideration of the month of frequently arduous service by Platoons A and B in the Western Desert, and also with the purpose of giving AFS men in Syria an opportunity to gain experience in desert work, it was decided by Colonel Richmond to effect a transfer of the units. He stipulated that the transfer be gradual, and so arranged as to avoid any dislocation of service in either area. A further decision was that the four platoons which had. on paper made up 11 AFS Ambulance Car Company should in practice function as one company. With this in view, Captain King was placed in charge of all AFS personnel in the Western Desert.

(Beirut, July 29)

Captain C.B. Ives arrived in Beirut late in the afternoon of July 29th and immediately went into conference with Lieutenant Frederick Hoeing in regard to the transfer of units. On the following morning, Lieutenant DePew came to Beirut to participate in the conferences.

The transfer was begun on Friday, July 31st, when Lieutenant Hoeing left for the Western Desert with these men: Wood, Goff, Sayen, Downs, Moyle, R. Pierce, Miller, Powers. A half-hour later a unit from the Damascus area started for the desert: DeTray, Gilmore, Rieser, Hately, White.

The lorries which took these men returned from the desert in a few days with men of A and B Platoons; and this method of transfer has continued.

On August 6th, Lieutenants Dun and Laiser, and Groblewski and Searles left for the desert;

On August 9th,--- W. D. Brown, Callahan, Desloge, Follansbee, Gillis, Pierce, Rath, Stein, Whiteside, Zittel;

On August 12th,--- R. Allen, Brady, Holder, J.N. Hobbs, Jones, Moors, Olden, Stillman, Thompson;

On August 14th,--- Lieutenant DePew and Harding;

On August 16th.--- J. Carter, J. Willson, Babcock, Pfeiler, Ofner, Beaker, Knuepfer;

On August 20th.--- Laverack, A. Wright, M. Wright, Gaukroger, T. White, Curley, Taussig;

On August 21st,--- Grove, Scott, Payne, Clay, Schwab, Paulson, Winters.

(Cairo, Aug. 15)

On August 1st, the American Field Service made a payment of twenty dollars expense money to AFS personnel in the Middle East. Definitely, there will be a payment of twenty dollars on September 1st and October 1st. It can now be promised, in consideration of the state of funds available, that payments will be continued after October 1st.

(Beirut, Aug 16)

Colonel Richmond has made recommendations to the British that AFS personnel be permitted to re-enlist on terms of giving notice of a certain number of months of leaving service. As soon as there is an official decision regarding his recommendations it will be announced in the NEWS BULLETIN.

If AFS men elect to return to the United States, Colonel Richmond said, the British will arrange for shipping space to be available as soon as possible after the expiration date of their year's enlistment.

(Cairo, Aug 19 --- via New York)

The following is quoted from a letter to Mr. Galatti, written by Colonel Rex Benson, British Military Attaché in Washington:

"To say that the Middle East Army is satisfied with the work of the American Field Service is putting it mildly.. They have been magnificent".

Of course you remember the story in the July issue of the NEWS BULLETIN,---The American Field Service at Bir Hacheim by Lorenzo Semple 3rd.

With Sample, at Hacheim, was Arthur Stratton, and we persuaded him to write about his experiences. Stratton has a great capacity for seeing and feeling; he is an able, professional writer; he brings you an incisively detailed story.

(This is to supplement The Goat Semple's very good account of the French Group at Bir Hacheim, and I shall go back to our departure from Aaley and Beyrouth in the end of March.)

We nearly missed the train. The truck crawled along that bumpy but beautiful road from Beyrouth to Haiffa at about 20 miles an hour, and so we barely made the train. It is a long ride. We managed pretty well, however, and Tom Esten and I took turns guarding the luggage. The windows were open. The orange trees were in full bloom. I am afraid Tom caught cold. I began to understand why brides wear orange blossoms; that fragrance brings to mind weddings and other things.

We got to Cairo and Stuyvesant met us at the train with an ambulance. He took us out to the Free French camp at Mena, where we established ourselves in a tent under the pyramids. The food was good. Alan sent us a case of beer. For the next few days we got things in order, and saw the town. Esten, Krusi, and I took a look at mosques and the citadel. We walked through the souks. We ate good food. One night with the full moon shining, Wood, Krusi, and I crossed the small and sandy desert to climb the pyramids. On the way we heard a loud voice challenge us, and stopped, fearing the worst for there's a lot of armed guards around, and they don't speak much French, and no English. We stood still. And an indistinct Egyptian in a sort of nightgown ran up. "Guide? You want guide for pyramids?" We told him no.

So we climbed the pyramid. There's a tent on the top. The pyramid was all it should be. Then we climbed down. We visited a tomb, and went over to pay our respects to the Sphinx. She's walled in with miscellaneous stones and high wire fences, but we made friends with the police, who gave us tea and allowed us to climb over her ancient (restored) paws. The National Geographic and the movies and Camel cigarettes have managed to take the edge off those geometrical marvels, but still, the pyramids are all they should be. Their immense perfection makes them belittle themselves; you don't realize their enormity. Ironically enough they have outlived their purpose as memorials to dead kings, and have become monuments to death and cruelty, and man's ingenuity. They are tours-de-force instead of architecture, for they culminate as dead-ends. They are more like Brobdingnagian kindergarten toys left carelessly on the sands, than like memorials. They are trivial and enormous. They prove that death is death, and so you might as well get used to the idea. Besides, thieves broke in. They prove that one man can do anything no matter how foolish, given enough determination and a hundred million slaves. And that is what they ultimately have become: reminders of stupidity, cruelty, and power wielded by tyrants. They are whims of stone.

Having decided so, I climbed down Egypt's trademark, and went to bed. But it was a command performance, and I am glad I climbed the pyramids by moonlight.

Greenough, Hirschberg, Kulak, Semple, and I went by train to Mersa Matruh, Alan, Hammond, Esten, Krusi, and Wood drove by way of Alexandria. Tichenor stayed behind in the hospital at Mena, for he felt rotten; it was bronchitis. Esten took him to the doctor, and remarked that he himself was feeling punk. But he didn't want to stay behind. The French were expecting us, and they had waited for several months. Our ambulances were in the wild hands of Arabs, Spaniards, Mexicans, and French from the Foreign Legion. Stuyvesant wanted us to get out there.

The train was pretty bad; it was very crowded and very uncomfortable. But we managed to reach Mersa Matruh intact, if worn out. Kulak had spent the night before with his friends the Poles, just back from nine months on the desert, and that had been a fine wild night of celebration. He was tired. At Mersa, the Major in charge of the Transit Camp put us inside the officers' compound. We had a tent to ourselves, ate well, and spent a good deal of time in the bar.

We were to take the next train out (which left at four in the morning, I think) for the rail head, and there we were to meet Stuyvesant. We didn't know how we'd get on to Tobruk and Bir Bu Maafes. I spent the day walking around the town and the harbor, walking out to the point, and then going swimming. It was good but cold. Mersa Matruh used to be the Greek port for the oracle of Jupiter Ammon, who held forth at what is now called the Oasis of Siwa, a couple of hundred miles inland. Cleopatra and Antony put in there in her golden barge after the defeat at Actium. I got this out of a book. The town has changed, and now though it is still chiefly Greek, it is Greek of the sponge fishermen, and they have had to leave.

I was a bit worried about how, we'd get on to Tobruk. But there are more ways than one of skinning a cat. The others had the right idea. They set to work in the bar, and before the night as done we had a ride in an ambulance convoy returning to Bardia. From there we could catch a ride on in to Tobruk. The Goat made friends with the Major, who took him into his rug and silk hung tent, where the Goat learned all about Commando raids, and got a private view of the various robes and disguises the Major used in his work. And, as I say, we also got a ride.

Next night at Bardia. Next noon at Tobruk. We hadn't been in the courtyard of the 62nd General half an hour before Smith showed up, and in another ten minutes up drove Alan and the rest of the group. Esten was feeling pretty bad, they told me, and I went over to see him. He looked like death. He lay in the back of the ambulance along with our duffle bags, a barrel of wine, and a sack of hard rations; he lay in his sleeping bag, and wore dark glasses. The red and yellow dust powered his face, and crusted his lips. He was pretty bad, indeed. It takes a few minutes of red tape to get a man into any hospital, and Tom could barely stand. He felt ill in Alexandria, and really bad in Bardia. At Tobruk they found he had pneumonia and pleurisy.

We left him there and in two ambulances drove across the unfamiliar desert to Bir Bu Maafes, which sounds in French like Bir Bu My Buttocks, and that is the way we remembered it at first. The long wadi at El Adem was in full bloom, and My Buttocks was a small, dry garden. The flowers smelled good, and that first month skylarks sang above us. April was hotter, as a matter of fact, than May or June, and we learned about the Khamsin, also called the Simoun. Simoun Simoun. I wonder if she is giving out any more gold latch keys?

Then next day we went up the twenty-five miles to Bir Hacheim for a vin d'honneur the Colonel-doctor gave us. This was a great success. Or perhaps that came a day later. I believe so, for I went to see Esten twice. Smitty and I came and some one else took a load into Tobruk, and we went swimming at the Beach Hospital and ate in the Friends' mess at Spears'. At any rate, the vin d'honneur was a complete success, though the food was desert rations. With the French, all men eat alike on the desert. It was good, for the French take an interest in food, and they know how important it is to feed working soldiers as well as possible. Anyhow, the French know how to make the strictest rations palatable. We had wine, of course, and also Scotch and gin, and a very good time. Smitty' s wife, Nancy, an Australian nurse, with Spears', was stationed at Bir Hacheim. She had charge of the operating theatre, as I later found out first hand. It was a first-rate celebration.

After that I drove back to Bir Bu Maafes, and went on to Tobruk. That's about fifty miles, and it was the first time I'd driven alone across the desert. I was more than somewhat anxious, but all the landmarks turned up---------------------------------- (censored) ------------------------------------------------------------------one Messerschmidt looked as though it were all ready to take off, but Greenough and Tich (after he got up) investigated one day. They found that some Frenchman had made his mark and left inside the cockpit his commentary upon the Boche. It smelled. They thought at first that the stench came from the remainders of the pilot, but not at all. He was a prisoner in a camp some place.

I got to the escarpment, and then saw El Adem. That was a relief. I stopped to pick some flowers so that Thomas could get an idea of what the wadis looked like. He was a painter. Then I hit the road to Tobruk. In those days it was full of pits and holes and harder to drive than the rocky, dusty, bushy desert, which sometimes opens up like the best of hard gravelled roads.

Thomas was in bed in a ward with about fifty other men. The night before a few Stukas had dropped some stuff on the harbor, but Thomas had been through a lot of raids in Lorraine, and in Paris. He stayed on in Paris through the fall and winter of 1940 -41. I tried to cheer him up by saying that Tobruk had at one time the best and largest ak-ak in the world. I described the guns and the various defences. One shell was a sort of bomb with a private parachute. Yes, I said, the best in the world. I doubt it, said Thomas. The German defences of Paris . . . and he told me about a raid there. He was doubting Thomas, but I thought he must be feeling better. Otherwise he might not have argued. I had a swim that evening, and slept in the ambulance parked on the rocks above the water.

How good it is to drive off the flat dusty desert, and then dive into the flat and wet blue sea. I wonder what color the Greek wine used to be for Homer to call the water around the islands "wine-dark"? It is dark, but brilliant blue, and green and light where the sand is white under the water. The rocks are rough and black down there, but flat with coral along the water's edge. The rocks are grown over with small, transparent weeds, which are soft to lie on submerged in the clear water. Once, my black man from the Camerouns and I were swimming at nine at night when the Stukas came, and the place shot up with as fine a display as I shall ever see, the chains of Bofors shells looping and twisting, red, green, and brilliant white in the dark night, and the searchlights and huge guns piercing the black skies. This was something to see. Fragments fell in the water and bounced off the rocks around us, but we were safe under the ledges.

Next morning I packed for Tom, and told him I'd see him before long. He left on a hospital ship, which got through to Alexandria. A month later we had a garbled signal, saying that Stuyvesant was dead, and buried with full military honors in Alex, but Alan was with us at Bir Hacheim. Krusi had been wounded by that time, and Hirschberg injured in an accident. But we thought it must be Esten, and it was, we found out a couple of weeks later. He died on the table, with the knife in him.

I stayed at Bir Bu Maafes at first. The ambulances at Bir Hacheim brought their sick and wounded to a British relay ambulance near us. I didn't have much to do, so I built myself a castle of stones around my ambulance in the hillside above the wadi --- well,. I do not mean hillside. I mean slight rise, or small escarpment. Jerry bombed Bir Hacheim from time to time, and took photographs from the air.

One day Krusi and Kulak brought a load down. Alan and Wood passed by a little later on their way from Tobruk. After Tim and Stanlislas left, we saw a couple of low-flying planes pass by not far away. After Alan left, we got a message that one man was killed and two wounded. Machine-gunned from the air. Jeff and I grabbed a couple of spare tires and set out at a good rate in an ambulance with stretchers. We found Chuck Wood standing by the ambulance. It was Krusi's, and it was shot to pieces. A couple of fragments had gone through Tim's back. Kulak was all right. He had bandaged the wounds, and fixed Tim on a stretcher at some distance from the ambulance in case the Italians returned, and then he had set out running for help. Alan and Chuck found him, and they'd all gone on to Bir Hacheim, where the best surgeon in the whole desert operated. It is a wide desert, and Chuck had had to fire his pistol to attract the attention of a passing truck driver. Farther along, a Frenchman had been killed, and another burned when their car was strafed and took fire.

Krusi was sent back to Alexandria. His diaphragm was paralysed, and later on the lower lobes of his lung collapsed, but they say he will recover in a month or two. He flew home in June. The bit of metal which pierced his lung lodged directly back of his heart, but that won't do any harm. It was a close call. The bullets tore his belongings apart. One as big as the end of my index finger tore a hole through The Skies of Europe and ended up between the pages of Tim's diary. It wrote its own story.

Stanislas missed death then, and I hope he has the last, or latest, time. He took it calmly enough, and it was a close shave. Stan is calm at all times, except in argument, and then he waxes fast and furious. We had a few stirring times.

I went up to Bir Hacheim early in May, after Wood got his commission in the navy. There we parked our ambulances in holes around our tent, which was in the hollow in the corner of the camp allotted to the hospital. Our job was routine enough, except for the work on patrol. Then one ambulance went out with the advanced columns. This was front-line action, sometimes as much as fifty miles in front, or west, of Bir Hacheim. Water and food were problems, then, but what a good time we had. The dust and sand storms added a good deal of variety to our jobs which were never dull. When you head into a dust cloud, you never are sure exactly where you will come out, and the mines are thick in those parts. One storm turned the light brick red, and the air filled up almost solid with stinging blown sand. It was not the usual soft gray-white dust. It was hard sand. I got tired of waiting, and so I drove off and proceeded to lose myself thoroughly. That's very annoying, indeed, and I swore a good deal. But somehow you learn to find your way about. Greenough has a sort of extra sense in dust storms.

Springs and feed lines, they are the real menaces of the desert. There is no helping it: you break springs, and you have carburetor troubles. Once my baby conked out alone in the desert. So I discovered the inner mysteries of the goddamned thing. I forgot to prime it afterwards, which confused me, and spoiled my triumph. Had to be pulled to get started. Another time I stopped dead at ten-thirty at night just in sight of Tobruk, on that long hill down from El Adem. But I got a brand new pump out of it. The moon shone. At midnight, when I got to the hospital (towed), we had a small raid.

My turn on patrol came the two weeks just before the siege began. I had a marvelous time, though I broke a top leaf in two places, and I felt that now I was taking part in war on the desert. I picked up a pilot after his plane had fallen in flames from German ak-ak, and we thought the man burnt --- carbonizé, the French say. He was a French-Canadian, nineteen years old. The French Government gave him a banquet, actually a feast in the desert. Delicacies arrived that day from Alexandria; lettuce and tomatoes, eggs, artichokes. French cognac --- Otard --- and Havana cigars. That, plus bully (from Argentina), canned peas (from Oregon), potatoes (from Indiana), peaches (from Australia) made up the most memorable spread I shall ever sit down to. It was in honor of a man's escape. He was standing alone among the camel's thorn when I found him. He thought he was in enemy territory. The St. Andrew's Cross, and the small American flag painted on my ambulance told him he was among friends.

The Goat has told you about the siege. It is surprising how adaptable man is, for I think we almost got used to it before we had to leave. I read in a Time the reasons a man goes crazy in the army; I'm down on fifteen separate counts. But still, I am not afraid of going crazy now, if I'm not crazy now. You certainly find out about yourself in war times, it you are at all interested.

The Goat has told you about that night we left. I found out from various men in the hospitals what happened to Tich. The last I saw of him alive was when I ran down the line of ambulances to see who wanted a half-bottle of gin I had extra. The Goat was o.k.; Tich said he only liked gin with lemons and ice and water. I finally got rid of it between Mac and Stan Kulak. Then our convoy started up again, and the fireworks began. They were shooting 20 m.m. Bredas from both sides of us, and from in front, so we drove through streams of fire. Anyhow, they were incendiary and tracer bullets, which was something, for you could see them coming. You could see the Bofors shells, too, flying low overhead. The grenades and trench mortars, the 50 m.m. canon shells, all burst with a noise and a flash, but they came blackly. It is horrible to be towed, and to have no control of your vehicle, but it happened too quickly for me to be afraid, just very busy. But I must have been terrified when the ambulance burst into flames, and I found that I couldn't walk or use my left arm and hand. Later on I counted thirty-five holes in me, and that doesn't include the pinheads. But I was very lucky, for the fragments had to go through the sheet metal wall between the motor and the driver's seat. I was reaching, futilely, for the emergency, for the brakes shot out, when the burst of explosive bullets hit the engine, so that bits and pieces went through my shoes and into my toes, and sprayed both legs and my hand, wrist, and forearms. But no bones and no joints were broken. The nerve was paralyzed for a couple of weeks. The doctor made the muscles jump with Galvanic action in the hospital. This was astounding.

I lay beside the brilliant ambulance, yelling and calling out. But nobody came by, for the flames lighted up the desert all around me. The truck towing me was hit, too, but Fournier, the driver, was too busy working on it. I think he changed a wheel. Anyhow he was too busy there to help me with my ambulance. And everyone else was wounded. I think that the men in my ambulance must have been killed, before, when they shot out my tires and brakes and steering gear. Anyhow, I hope so.

I don't know how long it was, but finally I stood up to do something or other, and started to run, swinging legs from the hip joint. but I fell down among the camel's thorn, and fainted for a couple of minutes. I thought I was dead then. Later on some one came limping out of the blackness, and he took hold of me and we got to the thick. Fournier threw me in, and we drove off. I landed on a pile of wounded men, who could not help but groan. I crawled over onto a pile of blankets, but thought the blankets too solid. I edged onto a toolbox, which was cold and very wet.

Tichenor was lying under those blankets, but I didn't know it then. He was dead. Later on in the morning I saw a man with his eyes bandaged, and his body covered with bandages, and with new wounds opened among them. And I saw a naked young man with very red hair and his left leg cut off at the hip and bandaged. I recognized him from his hair and his missing leg later on, in the hospital in Beyrouth. The blind man asked for the little American, "little" being a term of affection, and I thought he meant me; I didn't know about Tich. We got into the same ambulance after we found the British, and the blind man began the story of the red-beaded fellow finished.

We rode all night, and we were alone, about thirty of us, all but two wounded, in an otherwise empty munitions truck across the desert twenty-five miles. The mist came up towards morning. They buried one man to give his coat to a naked young Frenchman whose arm was cut off, and whose thigh was wounded. He lay between a Tahitian in plaster, and a negro with a back wound.

The English buried Tich in the morning after they had bandaged us and given us a lot of hot tea to drink, sweet tea with milk in it. I lay on my back, knees bent; I smoked cigarettes and translated French to English and back again. I felt fine. I felt wonderful, I laughed, though I did not laugh when Fournier told me about my own wounded men, after I asked him. I covered up my face that moment, and so I didn't see Tich when they buried him. I lay beside him on the desert, but he lay on his back, too, and he was covered with blood. And so was I, but most of it was his blood.

"It was the American with the little beard", they told me to identify him. That was Tich, growing a patch of beard on his chin to amuse himself; and later on I saw the silver name bracelet we all wear, and it was Tichenor. His ambulance burned, too, for the red-head got out of it. The blind man was lying on the ground with some other wounded, and Tich must have been working with them, for when the fire of bullets went through his head and shoulders, he fell over on top at the men on the ground, and his body protected them from the grenades which came after. He was buried with the two others who were dead in the truck. I suppose they had thrown him in, too, thinking that he might be alive. Things were confused.

After that it was seventy-five miles in ambulances across the desert. Then the CCS, where Jeff and Bob found me. I had to get out of the ambulance. I couldn't stay in it any longer. The poor Tahitian's plastered arms and chest and legs stank, and the blind man groaned when we went aver the bumps. I had to get out, and that was a problem. Those English drivers had done their best for us all day, and it was only at the end that I couldn't stand it. I hadn't eaten for two or three days, I think. Anyhow, a doctor let me lie on the ground, and it was cool and lovely, and I could breathe. Jeff and Bob found me like that, and I began to feel better.

Afterwards, for four or five days it was ambulances and hospitals, the train, and relay stations, and finally Alexandria. At the Hadfield-Spears hospital, which had set up a week or two before at Sollum, the doctors took the bigger pieces out of me, but they were all small --- as big as my thumb-nail, or smaller. The Friends and the beautiful nurses washed me and fed me, and made my bed. It was o.k. I had sheets. The wind blew in from the Mediterranean, and the sun shone on the high chalk cliffs. The Goat turned up there. I wonder it you realize how very well he did, and how he managed to save his wounded men? His article doesn't make that clear enough. Stanislas is still missing. I hope he is in some hospital. We know that Stuyvesant, who was-captured before June ten (the night we left Bir Hacheim), and Glean and MacElwain are safe in Italy. But we don't know anything at all about Stanislas.

For readers who are not familiar with the clumps of initials which in the British Armies are as omnipresent as tea, we list a few with explanations.

Captain Ives may (and does) call the following "a personal narrative of what I saw and heard rather than a report on that period and part of the IFS work", but he covered a lot of ground and he saw and heard much, and his narrative should give you a pretty fair understanding of what the AFS has been doing out Alamein way.

Happily, too, he writes with a fine-pointed pen that does not strain blackly for effects.

When the Division arrived in the Western Desert in June they discovered AFS ambulances about, asked for some, and got twenty. Several of the twenty were in the mixed group of the Division, which, not far from Mersa Matruh, was surrounded. They probed, looking for a soft spot in the enemy lines; then, one night in the vague light of the full moon, they knifed and handgrenaded a path out of the ambush. They will tell you that their losses were surprisingly light and that the greatest proportion of casualties occurred among personnel of the medical and HQ units, because these were in the center of their formation and, in the uncertainty of darkness, the Jerry and Eyetye aimed roughly at the center of the target. In any event, the action was successful, but among the missing were three AFS drivers, --- Mortimer Belshaw, Laurence Sanders, William Mitchell.

I learned of these things later. I didn't go out to the Division until early in July. I left them three weeks later. The following is a personal narrative of what I saw and heard rather than a report on that period and part of the AFS work.

When I returned to our Field HQ on the first of July, after ten days of fun and games with my own particular kind of dysentery, I got the chance to go to the Desert. Our OC, Jim King, pushed a map towards me, pointed at an area near the Quattara Depression, and said that the Division was there or thereabouts and that he had found them a few days before by driving along an indicated series of dots on the map. He said that the road was pretty good. He said that the road might still be open.

John Moore and I made a morning start. By noon we came to some of our crowd who were doing ACC work and we ate lunch with them. Then we set out to find the road that King had shown us. Travelling westward, we noticed the lack of traffic and the quietness in the desert. Occasionally, there were distant scatterings of MT, and infrequent puffs of dust showed where trucks were following the desert tracks. When we could find some one to ask, we tried to learn whether King's road was open, but nobody seemed to know. Finally, we reached it and turned down it rather dubiously, for there were field guns nearby making some noise. In a couple of hundred yards or so, we came on an RAP sign and a Padre admiring the scenery. We put on our tin hats and asked him what the noise was all. about. He said that our side was shelling the Eyetyes who were beyond a little roll in the desert, which he pointed out. There were some explosions up the road and he said that the Eyetyes were answering. We thought that he ought to put on a tin hat, but he seemed quite unconcerned and content. He didn't know whether the road was open, but thought that the MO might. The MO stuck his head out of a dugout and said he didn't know either and immediately pulled back in the dugout. The Padre said that maybe the major at the Command Post would know; so we followed a truck to another dugout. The major said clearly and distinctly that the road was not open.

We retraced our route for a mile or so and then turned off on a track, hoping to find a way around the bulge in the lines. What looked like minefields made us turn back again. We went farther East then followed a truck to the top of a ridge. Here we found officers with a map covered by cellophane and marked with colored crayon. The officers pointed to a lot of desert and said that a tank battle was going on there and then pointed to a ridge beyond and said that the spots on the ridge were the Division MT. This meant that again we had to backtrack. We bumped eastward once more and then got on a promising-looking track and followed two Tommy ambulances. Some planes came over and we got out to look for holes in the ground, but there were none and anyway the planes buzzed off.

So we came to the ridge and to the top of it and turned West. But this was not the unit we were looking for and, rightly enough, no one knew where it was except its HQ. We found the HQ truck and officers with maps with colored markings. We smoked cigarettes and talked shop and, after a bit, we were given the compass bearing and a distance of twelve miles for the Division MDS. A major, who had joined in the small talk, said there was a good deal of soft sand along the bearing and that we better wait until the next day, because it would be dark in a couple of hours. However, it seemed to us that it would be at least as satisfactory to sleep on soft sand as on the stony ridge; so we took our bearing, sighted a whitish piece of desert on the horizon, and headed for it. The major was quite right about the sand but was unfamiliar with the desert-worthiness of our four-wheel-driven Dodge Pick-up. (By 'desertworthiness' I refer to its capacity to get itself and its passengers across desert and to remain, itself, in good condition. I do not mean to include its treatment of passengers in the course of the trip. It is a hard thing to believe that the Chrysler engineers deliberately designed the seat with a view to destroying the kidneys of driver and passenger, but Moore and I were, in no great length of time, forced to this difficult conclusion. It is otherwise, I may say in passing, with our Dodge ambulances, which give as nice a ride as one could ask.)

The whitish piece turned out to be on the side of another ridge and on the top of the ridge we found a track that we followed for a space. The sun was low when we saw a couple of vehicles in the distance and chased them in the hope of information. They were too far away and moving too fast and we lost them, but after a few minutes of driving at a guess --- having lost our bearing when we chose to chase the trucks --- John spotted the top of a Tommy ambulance dead ahead and we were at the MDS before sunset.

Dave Hume and his subsection were there and soon John Meeker came in with a load from the ADS. Hume had orders to move up to Main Div. in the morning, and Meeker was going back to his ADS. We followed them over the lip of the flat stretch of stones and along a track that was marked by a couple of strands of wire laid on the desert. Where Meeker's ADS had been the day before there was nothing but a truck or two in transit. Hume's crowd went ahead. but Meeker turned North to look for the ADS, and Moore and I followed. There were some guns going our way and the sound of guns ahead. Presently we came on a few armored cars and asked the way and were directed to go West again. In a while, a cloud of black smoke rose up ahead of us, some mile or so off Then we saw two or three other pillars of smoke and guessed that ammunition or petrol trucks had been hit. We stopped and asked an officer what it was all about. He said there had been a Stuka raid on Main Div.

We were there in a few minutes and could see lorries scattered throughout a sort of irregular valley of soft and hard earth. On the maps, such valleys in the stony crust of the desert are marked "Deirs" when they are big, as this one was (some two miles long and a half-mile across), but most soldiers call them "wadis". Seven trucks were burning. We went down into the wadi and came to where some of the ambulances of Dave Hume's crowd were waiting.

Nearby, men were sitting and lying on the ground and on stretchers and medical orderlies and an MO were working on them. After a while, the ambulances took the casualties to another part of the wadi, where a roof of canvas was put up on poles to give some shade and where they dug a few graves. It had been a twenty-minute raid.

We were told that Thomas' subsection had been sent to the MDS; so we bumped back and found, instead, that Tevis' crowd had been sent for, and that Thomas was still up forward at an ADS. Back we went, through the Main Div. wadi again and, losing our way, through a narrow track between minefields into what they called "the fortress". On the other side of the fortress we were blocked by more strings of barbed wire, indicating minefields, but we found a lieutenant who was going up forward and we followed him. In a few miles, there was another scattering of MT and another red cross flag. Thomas, Pattullo, Sullivan, and Nichols were there with two ambulances, and Tevis and Tom Morris came up in an ambulance just before dark. The Stukas had been over the MT here, too, and there were casualties in men and lorries. Late in the evening, there was another raid. Twenty of them flew high over us and eastwards towards Main Div. Then they turned North and, one by one, nosed over into their dives. As each one levelled out and the black smoke rose up beneath it, we wondered how many men had been killed and wounded. The Stuka had turned westward to go home, when some one shouted that the RAP was in front of them, and, straining our eyes at the evening sky, we saw the tiny shapes of fighter planes and heard the high-pitched whine of their motors. They went in head-on. It looked like a natural: stukas are slow, and these had fighter protection. But then the red sparks of ack-ack shells began to go up. It seemed insane for the guns to interfere when the fighters had so much better chance of doing damage. But perhaps the fighters were returning from a raid and were out of ammunition. In any event, they left the Stukas for the ack-ack to deal with. As far as we could see, they all got sway.

Before dark, the OC of the ADS came up and told us that we must be ready to move at midnight, that there would be an attack at 9.30. Evan Thomas and Sully went out to spend the night with the RAP. It looked like a very rough prospect for them and, in fact, they had a busy night of it. The rest of us lay down in our clothes to get some sleep before the time to move. Sharp on the dot of 9.30 came the noise of the guns. We went to sleep in the hope that things would go all right. But we slept on through and were awakened only by the dawn. The attack had run into a strong point. The ADS tents were crowded that morning. We went back to the MDS with our ambulances loaded with all they could carry.

At the MDS they asked if we could bring up more ambulances. Furthermore, we needed tires and tubes. So John Moore and I decided to go back to our HQ to see what could be done. We rattled and bumped again across the 30 miles of desert and then down the unsurfaced road to our ACC post, only to find that our ambulances had disappeared. Nearby, however, was Captain McCarthy and Felix Jenkins, who told us that the Army High Command had ordered our crowd to the Delta. At Alex, we got directions to Damanhur, and at Damanhur we were told that the AFS was still farther South. We found them, about sunset, crowded into the little square of bleak Delta land, beating at flies by day and mosquitoes by night. They did not like the place, which was in Tanta; nor, after three minutes of it, did we.

Two days later, McMeekan's subsection went out to replace Hume's, and Goodwin and Muller went with them, taking spare tires and tubes and miscellaneous parts. Joe Bradley and I followed them by a few hours with three more tires that Mr. Mathewson had managed to collect.

At the Division, we had to shuffle men about, to sort ourselves out so that the members of each subsection would work together as far as possible. Mars was evacuated back to base with dysentery. Childhouse showed up at the MDS with stomach cramps. Leister was holding his hand over a bad wisdom tooth. Sully laughed about his "capture" of an Italian pilot who had crashed and hurt his leg, Gaynor said he had been Stukaed eight times in three days, Gilmore complained that a hot bomb splinter had trickled into his slit trench while he was minding his own business. Thomas and Crudginton had come back from a night with an Indian column, screaming Stukas.

In the evening of the 9th, Meeker brought a load back from the ADS and a note from Johnny Goodwin asking for more ambulances and drivers; so, after dark, Duncan Murphy, Tevis, Morris, Bradley, and Metcalf went back with Meeker. Something was up that night, for we could hear the guns pounding steadily and could see their distant flashes of light.

Art Howe showed up the next day with his subsection plus two additional ambulances and Miller, Barrett, Lynch, and Brooke; so Even Thomas returned with the balance of his subsection to HQ. We were operating on a rough schedule of getting a fresh subsection out forward about every four days and sending back the one that had been out longest. The idea was to give everyone a chance at Field Ambulance work (a privilege, it was thought by those of us who had done only AAC jobs). The program would give each man about two weeks in the forward area and a chance thereafter to take a bath in something larger than a mess tin and to do something substantial about the maintenance of his car. It was a bit difficult, sometimes, to sell the fact that greasing, changing oil, and tightening bolts and nuts were just as important near the lines as far behind them.

Keyser and Gilmore came back with loads from an ADS in the evening and told nice stories about how anti-tank shells look when they bounce along the ground. There was something wrong with Keyser's car and Gilmore was due to go back to HQ; so, at the crack of dawn, I showed Barrett, Lynch, and Brooke how to get up to the wadi where two ADS's had been located the day before. We found the wadi, all right, but whereas I had known it as a great valley of sand thickly sprinkled with MT, guns, pup tents, and men, it was now empty of everything except a few used petrol tins. We drove around and got directions from occasional soldiers until we reached the edge of another big wadi as full of stuff as the other had been. No one here could give us any help on the new locations. As usual, though, it was just a matter of asking enough questions. We spent the morning at it. In the course of our wanderings we met Colonel Richmond, Captain King, and Glenn Russ, who had come out to have a look at what was going on.

In the afternoon, I showed the way forward to Howe's subsection, which took over from Dick Tevis'. One of the ADSs had moved since morning; so John Nettleton, who had come from our ACC crowd to solve our mechanical troubles, and I had to do some more driving about and asking questions. We learned that an attack was scheduled for the night and that more ambulances were needed up front. After supper, we bumped back to the MDS and lined up ambulances from Bill Gosline's subsection

It was nine before we were able to get started on the eight-mile journey to the wadi, Nettleton and I in front to show the way, and the rest of the cars close on each other's bumpers so as not to be lost in the darkness. There was so little light that after a mile John and I steered a wheel into a slit trench (empty), but one of the ambulances pulled us out with no difficulty. After that, I sat on the right forward mudguard, trying to spot holes and find tire tracks in the desert. Roughly, we aimed by compass and stars. Straight ahead, the enemy was throwing up flares. The colored signal lights of our Division rose to the North of us. After we had gone so far that we should have been in the wadi, we saw the vague shape of a Bren Gun Carrier not far away and I ran after it and got directions. As they told us, we went ahead another mile (flares were big and bright now) and then tu ned North. Three miles in the new direction brought us a "Halt!" The sentry told us that we were on the rim of the wadi. One by one, we skidded down the steep, sandy decline and, soon after, found the ambulances and trucks of the ADS packed up and ready to move and the men asleep on the sand. It was about midnight.

At 4.30, they woke us to say that the ADS was moving. In the blackness and silence, two of our cars got into the line and left. The others stayed behind with the car poste. John Nettleton went back to bed, but I stretched my legs for a while, watching the slow dawn sharpen the shadows in the wadi. The cooks were up first to get their petrol stoves roaring. After the sun came up and the flies came out --- as they always did with the early rays--- two or three men went out to a soft part in the side of the wadi. and dug a grave for the Colonel of a Battalion, who had died of wounds in the night. As we ate breakfast, the Padre said the service and they buried him.

Nettleton and I went to find where the ADS had gone. It was out of the wadi and a mile or so North. John got to work on a flat tire. Ralph Muller came in from an RAP with a medical orderly, the latter celebrating his twentieth birthday. They had gone forward the night before with the troops and they told of how the signal lights had organized and managed the attack. The MO of their RAP made a practice of working in a slit trench with the infantry, keeping his RAP three-tonner and his ambulance a few hundred yards back and out of the worst shooting, and signaling for the ambulance to come up only when he had finished with a patient. This was unusual. The MOs were expected to remain with their RAP trucks and wait for casualties to be brought to them by truck or Bren Carrier Later. John Meeker took Muller's job with that particular RAP and he told the MO that, in his opinions one of the most useless kinds of people in this war was a dead MO. Later still, the MO was reported captured.

Muller and his twenty-year old orderly said that they had spent a very busy night and morning. During the night, they had wandered all over the battlefield with a load of patients, trying to find the ADS in the darkness, and, having found it they wandered all over the battlefield again trying to get back to the RAP. For this, among other reasons, they had not slept for a long while and felt that it was a tiring and noisy way to celebrate a birthday. Ralph pulled a piece of shell splinter out of the side of his ambulance. A smaller piece, he said, with a much lower rate of feet-per-second had tapped him, gently, on the leg.

Kahlo drove in with bad brakes, a bad oil system, a missing bolt, and a loose steering wheel; and John Nettleton went to work again. He was at it the next day, too, with the following items. Grieb's speedometer, Duncan Murphy's brakes, Gibson's springs, Barrett's springs, Hyatt's tires. We couldn't have done without him.

There was a good deal of stuff landing around the ADS in the afternoon, which, someone said, was the result of being in an artillery box"; that is, more or less surrounded by our own artillery. However, a couple of cases of slit trench rash among us and the medical personnel were the only damage. Later the ADS moved out of the box. Our artillery was making a lot of noise, too.

We took Headley, Savage, and Griffith away from the reserve MDS, where they had been very bored, and sent them up to an ADS and made a few other shifts in an effort to keep subsections together. That night, a Stuka landed hard near the MDS leaving a piston as the biggest piece of salvage.

Next morning, the guns were quiet for the first time in several days. John busied himself with Kyle's car and mine and then he and I loaded up with all the empty petrol tins we could carry in the little truck. Our own attempt to go forward at night as well as the experiences of others, who, with cars full of patients, had been asked to get back to the MDS after dark, had inspired us to try to mark a good track between it and the ADSs well enough that the trip could be made without sun or moon. We picked a little-used track somewhat North of the usual one and spent the afternoon --- a hot afternoon --- putting down a tin every tenth of a mile. At about four o'clock we sew a Stuka raid that had left a string of bombs across the wadi at about the location, we thought, of McLarty and Grieb. We rather wanted to go up and see what had happened, but knew there was nothing we could do to help if any one had been hurt, and that we had a piece of work to finish. So we went ahead, finishing six miles with the sixtieth marker at the edge of the wadi and feeling hot, tired, and hungry. We went over to the ADS for supper and learned that McLarty had been hit. A fragment had scraped the end of his spine and broken part of his pelvis, but there was a tingling sensation in his legs, so the MO said he would probably be all right. His ambulance had been hit, too, though he was not in it at the time.

John Nettleton hustled me through supper so that we could get to the car and salvage as much as possible before miscellaneous other Dodge drivers should strip it of everything useful. We found it with its rear tires still burning and the interior of the body gutted by flames from the gas tank. But the front tires, engine, chassis, and body had been saved by throwing sand on the fire. John piled into it and had it fit to tow by seven o'clock. We hitched it to the back of my truck and dragged it to the MDS before dark. There, McLarty had just gone under the anaesthetic, and at 8.30 we were told by the doctor who performed the operation that he expected a full recovery.

I saw and talked with Mac the next morning. He was uncomfortable, but his voice and spirits were strong and he had no worry about his legs. Later in the day, I saw him again, when he felt much better and seemed to be getting some rest. As far as I could tell, he was never worried about his wound. Shortly thereafter, he was evacuated to Base. So was Barrett, with Sand Fly.

I found that both ADSs had moved during the night and came upon one just after some Stukas had paid a visit, leaving, however, only some large holes nearby and no casualties. (There was a Stuka-pilot prisoner in the tent at the time, but McMeekan couldn't find out how he liked it because he didn't speak English.)

Then Wick Johnston showed up with Lewis' subsection, plus Sam Rogers, for relief purposes. Nettleton and Jim Moore set off for HQ, towing McLarty's ambulance. I showed them the way and met Libber and Knuepfer on the northern edge of the wadi, their ambulance immobilized by shell splinters in the tires. A couple of hundred yards beyond, we found Dave Hyatt getting a tow. His instrument panel had an unpleasant hole in it and the driving wheel and seat were chopped up, but Dave was still in one piece. Wick and I towed him back to Libber's car so that Libber could get his tires. Then we had a cup of cocoa and crackers at the 5th ADS and went looking for the 4th. As we wandered about the desert, asking directions, a flight of Stukas appeared in the evening sky, a few miles to the East. We stopped to look for holes in the ground and to watch the ack-ack throw up their red tracer shells and their little puffs of smoke. There was a nasty string of black explosions, but one bomber came down. A few minutes later, another bunch came over, closer to us this time. All the neighboring holes were filled with soldiers; so Wick and I lay on the stony ground and, as the planes swung around in our direction, we tried to imagine that we were very, very small and that our tin hats were quite thick. But they started their dives through the fountain of ack-ack before they got us in line. We saw their black bombs drop out of their bellies and we hoped the usual hopes. Wick said, plaintively, that he had trouble in getting the idea that it was real. I had none.

Finally with the coming of darkness, we found the ADS, had a bottle of beer apiece (Wick had brought out a case with him), and settled down for the night in slit trenches. A tank battle had just been finished and the tanks rumbled and clanked past us in the darkness. We parked the car near the trenches, hoping, sincerely, that the tankmen would see it and avoid it by a wide enough margin to miss us. One of the tanks, with a man wounded and another dead, stopped to ask for the ADS. It was only some fifty yards away, but the night was too dark to show it. Then, when we were nicely settled, Johnny Goodwin came up to say that because of the battle we must stand by to clear out at a minute's notice. We dressed again and moved over near the tent. All the patients were loaded into ambulances and, though they had no hope of finding the MDS that night, they were sent out to put a few more miles between them and the front. Art Howe went to get Dave Hyatt from his immobilized ambulance so that he would not be stranded if there should be a retreat. Somehow or other he found him and brought him back to the ADS.

At 4.30 we were wakened and moved off. Soon Libber had another flat but got his spare on in time to catch up with the rest; of the cars. In a while there was a wait, and I had time for a shave, and a YMCA man who was following us came up and gave us a can of peaches and a can of condensed milk.

The ADS finally settled down in our old wadi, but in a part about a couple of miles from where Hyatt's car had been left. We were worried about it, for it didn't take long for the parts to disappear from an abandoned car; so as soon as the ADS started digging their new set of alit trenches, Wick took me to the lonely ambulance and left; me to stand watch over it while he went back to scrounge an extra spare tire. The spare, driver's seat had vanished during the night or in the early morning, but otherwise it seemed to be all there. Wick and Hyatt were back after a while and we put on some tires and towed the car to the MDS.

We arrived just in time to see the MDS pulling stakes and to get a map reference for its new location. A Tommy Field Ambulance had arrived to take over this location. John Goodwin's crowd was also there, having been relieved by the Lewis subsection, and we drank some beer with them before they set out for HQ. They were relaxing fast after some strenuous days. Wick went with them, for he had come up on a temporary basis.

I set out by myself to find the new location of the MDS and, after getting to what I thought was the spot, found an ADS. Now thoroughly lost, I went East and talked to a signals man, then North and talked to a Tommy ambulance driver, then West and talked to a Tommy officer, then Southwest and found the reserve MDS. From there, it was an easy run by a track to the active one. Some of Lewis' bunch were there and they said that Lee Kyle's car had blown up in a minefield but without damage to Lee or his patients.

I was putting some air in my tires and chewing the fat with the transportation officer when John Nettleton drove up with Sully beside him. It seemed that Sully had begun to pine and waste away at the ACC job, so they had sent; him back to the fireworks for his health's sake. I asked John if he had found Dave Hyatt's wreck at the Tommy Field Ambulance, where we'd left it, and he answered that he had not only found it but fixed it so that it would run and Dave had driven it here. Just a matter of a few wires, he said, but I thought; him a miracle worker. The transportation officer looked at us dubiously for a minute and then said that since the car was running we could have the spare driver's seat.

There was a noisy battle in the West when the sun went down and there was a new moon in the sky.

Next morning, I went out to the new locations of the ADSs and found that McMeekan had acquired a big German truck --- just saw it abandoned, he said, and drove it back. It came in handy, for the ADS had lost a truck lie also told about Kyle's car. He had been sitting beside Lee, following Gibson and Savage through the minefield in the night when the mine went off. Later he had gone back to the field to see if he could salvage any of the parts, but there had been too much machine-gunning to make the proposition attractive. He said he thought it fairly dangerous to go into the minefield on foot and I agreed.

I made a tour of the RAPs to learn the locations of our cars. Griffith and I were driving from one RAP to another when we noticed men running for cover, the usual warning of trouble from the air. We stopped, put on tin hats, got out and began looking for holes in the ground. Before we could make much progress we saw two planes skimming across the desert not more than thirty feet above the ground. One passed on each side of us, unduly close, we thought, their Jerry crosses very big and black. They were moving so fast and so low that no one in all that plain, bristling with guns, could even throw a stone at them.

Our side threw a lot of shells over during the day, but things were quiet in the evening, when Nettleton went the rounds, swapping good tires for flats. There was a raid near the MDS in the morning, which gave an extra job to Buzz Frank and Tommy Stix who were operating a shuttle service between the tents there. Bill Riegelman got a crack at first aid with a tourniquet for a sergeant's shattered foot, but, as so often happened, the luck was bad and the man died under anaesthetic.

Near midnight, John and I were wakened by a few bombs not far away. It was a single plane, which buzzed around for a while, fired its machine guns a bit, and then buzzed off. Next day, some one suggested that it might have been one of our planes, lost and trying to get a reaction from the guns so that it could get its location. We took a poor view of such methods of navigation.

The guns were busy next day getting ready for a late afternoon attack. John and Tommy Breivogel and I made the rounds of the RAPs looking for mechanical and tire troubles, of which we found none, and handing out the remaining bottles of beer that Wick had brought out.

We had some business et Div. HQ, where we found not only the ADMS but also three U.S. reporters and photographers, one of whom was a photographer from Life, named Bob Landry. The ADMS said some very nice things about AFS drivers and said that he had written to his chief in the same vein. Bob Landry said he had a lovely picture of a couple of our boys picking up a stretcher on which Landry's batman was lying. John Nettleton told him that he could get just as nice pictures, and certainly more authentic ones, if he would go to one of the ADSs and ride around in one of our ambulances until it picked up a real casualty; but Mr. Landry, hearing the sound of guns, said that such a program might result in his being hurt, that as a dead photographer, he would be of no value to the American Public (and Life Magazine) and that the Scotch at Div. HQ was really very good. Somewhat later, John got a batch of Lifes from home and, as he was thumbing through one of them, called to me. "Do you remember that joker Landry of Life Magazine?" he said. I admitted it. "Here's some of the pictures he takes", and John showed me a three-page spread of a Hollywood starlet in a very one-piece bathing suit. We reflected that the war had torn Mr. Landry from his proper niche in the world and we were fairly unhappy for a moment or two.

Andy Geer was up the next day and went out to see what could be done about Kyle's car in the minefield. When he got there, he and Buck Kahlo were working on the ambulance. He had talked with some REs who told him that they had just finished cleaning out the mines-and we noticed some MT parked around in the field. The left front wheel of Kyle's oar had been badly bent and twisted by the explosion and the steering joints broken. John Nettleton, with his usual passion for total salvage, thought that the car could be towed and he set to work jacking up the front end and hitching it to the rear of my Pick-up.

Then he saw some REs planting barbed wire stakes on a line that ran past the wrecked ambulance within a distance of some ten yards. We asked what they were up to and were told that the area on the ambulance side of the stakes might still have a few mines left in it but that the area on the other side was "guaranteed" I quote "Guaranteed". Well, we figured we would take a chance on the ten yards. It turned out that the body of my Pick-up was too low to do a successful towing job. Andy's car was higher; so we unhitched from mine and hitched to his. McMeekan, Nettleton, and I squeezed into the cab of my truck and Charley deRimsingeur got into the back. Buck Kahlo got onto the "glory seat" of Andy's truck ( a chair above and back of his cab, set there for purposes of observation) while Andy drove. We started out of the mine field, I making a sharp turn after we passed the line of stakes, but Andy being forced to make a wider circle because the ambulance was hitched so closely to the rear of his truck. We were both in the "guaranteed" area when there was an explosion. A cloud of smoke drifted past the cab of my Pick-up. I thought: When Kyle went up he was very lucky. He and the whole ambulance should have been blown to small pieces. This time, Andy must have got the business. What can we do to put Andy together again? Nettleton thought: We have no stretchers. Poor view. McMeekan thought: Getting blown up in this particular minefield is beginning to get me down. deRimsingeur thought: I distinctly felt pieces of something hit my arms and legs. We got out of our truck in a hurry. I ran around to the driver's side of Andy's car. The door opened and Andy slid out. He seemed to be all-in one piece, though his eyes were glassy and there was a little blood on one cheek. I wondered what, if anything, had happened to his insides. He stared at me in a solemn daze and said, "Well, I got rid of the damned car". Buck Kahlo was hopping around on one leg. Andy told him to lie down, but Buck only lifted up one aide of his shorts, looked at his leg, and found that he had something of a bruise. Everyone felt a lot better quite soon. Some Tommys walked up to see if we were all right. Andy began to worry about other methods of salvage and asked them to take him and me to their OC. They led us to a truck and we climbed in and began bouncing across the minefield in pursuit of the officer, expecting the truck to go up in our faces any minute. Presently, we came upon a Tommy major, sitting on a chair, having his hair cut by his sergeant. Andy asked if it would be advisable to leave a man with our wrecked cars until the following day. The major said no, on the grounds that the Germans might arrive there during the night. Then he commiserated us on our bad luck. "Why", said he, "in the last forty-eight hours I've lost four trucks in this bloody minefield. "This fellow"---indicating the sergeant -- went up only yesterday. Actually, it's damned annoying." The sergeant smiled in a deprecating manner as though asking us to indulge and forgive his OC's high temper. As we bounced back to our wrecks, one of the Tommys leaned over and said that one really shouldn't blame the REs, because it was very difficult to get all the mines.

Since we couldn't leave a guard on the cars. Andy determined to salvage everything possible and we worked fast taking off as many parts as we could before nightfall. Andy and Mac and Charley loaded the parts onto a stretcher and carried them through the minefield to another of our ambulances, reflecting, all the while, that the additional weight of the parts might be just enough to make their footsteps heavy enough for another explosion. But there was none.

We returned to the MDS for the night, Andy with a sore shoulder, headache, scratched cheek, and charley horse

McMeekan's subsection went back to HQ the next morning and John Nettleton and I made the rounds of the ADSs and RAPs, with particular emphasis on keeping up tire pressures and greasing the spring shoakles We had lunch of curried meat at an ADS whose cook had been a hotel chef in civilian life. We ate so well that we were dopey all afternoon.

When we made the usual rounds the next day, the guns were making a row because an attack was scheduled for the afternoon. All our crews seemed happy, so John and I went back to the MDS to take a siesta in the hot sun and wait for Larry Marsh and Wick Johnston who were to come out to relieve me. They showed up around 3 PM with Pemberton's subsection. Wick said he thought that McLarty was going to die. I took Larry around to the various RAPs to give him the lay of the land. As we were getting set for the night, we saw the tents of the ADS coming down and learned that it was to move West three miles at 8. We went along with it to the new location and, then, missing one of our ambulances that was supposed to have gone up, we went back and undertook to show the drivers the way. It was a very black and a very noisy night. After three miles on the bearing we could see nothing. We went along with it to the new location and, then, missing one of our ambulances that was supposed to have gone up, we went back and undertook to show the drivers the way. It was very black and a very noisy night. After three miles on the bearing we could see nothing. We went on a bit farther and found an RAP, which referred us to a major who had a map and an idea of where he was. He gave us a new bearing which we followed for two miles, very nearly running into a slit trench (occupied) on the way. We were still lost at 10.30, so we went to bed. The racket and the flashes on the sky line seemed to indicate a full scale attack.

We were up and on our way before sunrise. We roamed around a bit but soon found the advanced ADS. Nine of our ambulances were already there and more came up later. The wounded were streaming in from the RAPs. Our guns were as noisy as ever, but now the enemy were answering and we were hearing "Whee--ee--ee--Bang (theirs) as well as "Bang-Whee--ee--ee" (ours). Al Ogle was working an RAP and had no spare driver; so I went out with him to kill time, being somewhat reluctant to start back for HQ while the show was on. He apologized for the quiet state of affairs at his RAP, but occasionally a truck or Bran Carrier would bring in casualties and give him a cargo. I hung around, talking to the MO and the rest of the crew, who had been working all night, and sometimes sitting down when a "Whee-ee-ee-Bange" sounded particularly close. This sitting down gave me a false sense of security as well as something to do; but I had to give it up because the MO worked on the theory that you never heard the one that got you and that, therefore, the ones you heard were innocuous. I did not accept his thesis, but was morally pressured into behaving as though I did.

The RAP was just; a small patch of ground with a line of sand bags piled three high on two sides and half s dozen slit trenches nearby. The MO was stuffing sulphanilamide into a hole in a man's slide and pulling the edges together with s needle and thread when we noticed quite a number of planes very high in the air and tried to figure out from their shapes and formation what they were. The ack-ack hadn't tried to do anything about; them but, on the other hand, they were very high They came lower and towards us and quite suddenly and simultaneously we and the ack-ack gunners realized that they were Jerry. A shallow slit trench, suitable for one, was handy; so I got in. The first; planes came very low, or so it seemed. After I saw their bombs come out, I turned my face towards the bottom of the trench and left it there. The noise of the series of explosions which followed I can only describe as excessive. With each of the many explosions the earth of the slit trench shivered. When it was over, I turned my face around and sat up. A cloud of smoke was drifting over the RAP. There was no sound of any one moving or of any one's voice and I wondered what I should see. Then the smoke went by and disclosed that the MO still sat by his patient with his needle and thread in his hands. The other men came out of their trenches. About a hundred yards away two trucks were burning, crackling, and exploding. They had been loaded with ammunition. A little group of four or five Maoris were running away from one of the trucks. One of the men was supported between two others and they were all shouting and crying out. Al Ogle drove over to them and got one man on a stretcher, while another lay on the floor of the ambulance. Three more AF ambulances were around the RAP within a minute or two. They had seen the raid from a distance and had high-tailed over to look for passengers.

After lunch, I returned to the MDS and picked up Bill Riegelman, who was scheduled to go back to HQ. He had helped in the operating tent all night and said that there had been two big operations that, without our ambulances, could not have been attempted because the patients would have been dead by the time they reached the MDS

Bill and I bounced to the rear along the desert track and then to our ACC post where we found that many of our people were away, attending Keith McLarty's funeral in Alexandria. He was buried near Tom Esten.

Next day, Dave Hyatt's crowd came back, bringing Dan Beatty with them and leaving them et the CCS, for he had come s cropper the day before. I went over to the CCS tent and talked with him. He and Jack Brooke had been going back on RAP when they got lost and quite suddenly found a lot of machine gun bullets falling around them. They got out to look for shelter just in time to see their ambulance catch fire. Under the screen of the smoke, they crawled a hundred yards or so to a slit trench and waited there seven hours until darkness. Then they started to walk book to the ADS. On the way, Beatty had to stop and take off a shoe, for, he said, a blister was bothering him. They reached the ADS without more trouble and had a good sleep but, in the morning, when Beatty examined his blister, it looked rather peculiar and he noticed that there was a small hole in his shoe at the piece where his foot was sore. And MO told him he had a little piece of steel under the skin, bandaged him up, and sent him back.

That day, the AFS made 54 trips from the CCS to the Base Hospitals in Alexandria.

Dave Hyatt's stories of his experiences in the AFS, written for the North American Newspaper Alliance, have appeared in several newspapers in the United States. The New York TIMES used and by-lined his account of the flight from Tobruk.

Hyatt has the good reporters interest in people, the feeling for a story, and the ability to write it.

Desert warfare is fantastic because you're never exactly sure where you are or where Jerry is. You navigate by compass bearing over monotonous sandy terrain, using the sun or stars as a guide because of the shortage of compasses. You may be told to go Northeast to an RAP and you may keep your course fairly accurately, but in the meantime the RAP has moved with its battalion. Not knowing this, you keep on going. Finally you come to the tanks. You ask the tankmen where the RAP is. They laugh, "Well", they say, "it's not where you're heading. We've been watching Jerry all morning ---he's just over that ridge." So you head back, wander some more, and finally---if you've luck--- find your outfit.

In our subsection were Fred Quale, Russell Knuepfer, Dick Turk, Ed Libber, Dick Kaynor, Jack Brooke, Dan Beatty, and Egil Mack. Fred Quale was somehow always where he was needed when he was needed most. Russell Knuepfer and Ed Libber worked at an RAP while the Eyeties and New Zealanders were going at it with bayonets just ahead of them. Dick Turk and Dick Kaynor went through a siege of shelling that covered their area thoroughly but miraculously missed them. Beatty and Brooke had their ambulance machine-gunned and spent a day in a slit trench in no-man's land, waiting for the cover of darkness, and Beatty suffered a foot wound. And Egil Mack, when I tried to keep him at the ADS the night of the advance, cussed such a blue streak as only Egil can --- that, for his refusal to allow any one to take a tougher assignment then himself, he went into the midst of the heaviest artillery barrage thus far sent up in the Western Desert.

But their stories are for them to tell: I can only pay them tribute My own story, not at all spectacular, nevertheless may give an idea of the sort of work we did at El Alamein.

On our fourth afternoon there, Jerry shelled our artillery heavily. The Field Artillery RAP, where I was stationed, was back center among the guns. Getting off lorries, coming up past our RAP, come of the Infantrymen walking into the shelling broke down under the strain. Their nerves worn ragged, they cried, and we had to haul them back. Later, we brought in wounded from a shelled gunpost half a mile above us. One of them got it in the groin and four of us had to hold him to give him morphine. He died as we put him in the ambulance.

That night we attacked. In a night column, lorries in the middle and guns on either side, we moved up six miles under cover of darkness. From daybreak on, we hauled back wounded an fast as we could. Mobs of prisoners were being driven on foot back from the fighting area. We picked up a paunchy Eyetye Divisional Commander from one of these mobs. He'd been wounded in the arm. Three young Eyetyes stood by him, tried to go with him, but he gave them the Fascist salute and waved them back into the cluster of prisoners. It looked like Grand Opera. Still, the eyes of the young men were wet.

Around the RAP, shelling continued in full fury. Just after the noon mess, a sergeant in a Jeep led us along the edge of a minefield far beyond our lines to pick up six wounded Jerries. Their own trench mortars were landing within, a hundred yards, and they cheered us as we came up. I went over to one who was sitting against the trench, a dazed look in his eyes. He was dead. Beside him, two of our men lay dead. Three of the wounded Jerries helped load the other three, prostrate with back and head injuries, and we carefully skirted the minefield and got out as fast as we could.

We were no sooner back at the RAP than a lorry brought in a wounded man. We rushed him to the Car Post. A handsome young New Zealand captain had just driven up with a truckload of wounded Jerry prisoners. Behind him was a truckload of wounded Eyetyes. The captain grinned, "Getting kind of hot up here, isn't it, Yank?" he said, kidding.

Then we heard planes. We'd been getting four or five Stuka raids a day, and we knew what they could be. We hopped down from our car fast. I went back. lifted the patient out, found him a slit trench, and then got in one myself. For several minutes ack ack pounded rapidly and then the bombs dropped. One bomb landed within ten yards; the other within fifteen. Instantly there were screams. When I heard them I figured I was a dead monkey. The feeling wasn't so much fear as inevitability. You just lay there and waited for it.

And then it was all dust around us and voices of stunned men, unhit yet seemingly unable to move from the shock. They were yelling, "Stretcher, stretcher!" for those wounded. I grabbed a canvas and rushed over there, and the handsome young captain's middle and leg and hip lay wide open. I loaded him on while the Doctor gave him morphine. I loaded a man whose lung was punctured and he died while I was loading him. Then we put the young captain in the Carpost ambulance. He came to, recognized me. "Yank", he said weakly, "it didn't take 'em long to get me, did it?" He passed out as he finished saying it.

Then, down below, somebody yelled ambulance, and I ran back to my car. Shrapnel had ripped into the front end of it, making a big hole, had torn through the dashboard, wrecked the steering wheel. I yelled to Freddie Quale, who was fifty yards away, to come over, and I turned the extinguisher on the flames. Then finally, when the extinguisher was exhausted, I cut out the burning seat with my knife.

The wounded Jerries in the captain's truck were yelling in pain. Just behind it, the truck full of Eyetyes was shrapnel-racked, demobilized. The Eyetyes were moaning hysterically. McMeekan drove up and got the captain's truck going. We hauled the Eyetyes on our shoulders from the wrecked truck and piled them into the truck with the Jerries. The Eyetyes were crying and moaning and carrying on like children. Mac drove them down to the ADS.

Then I looked for my orderly. He hadn't turned up anyplace and I couldn't understand it. I searched the whole area. I looked et the dead man, covered with dust, that I'd loaded on a stretcher earlier. But he had a mustache. No trace of my orderly could be found, nor was there any sign of him at the two ADS or at the MDS. He must have got a direct hit. I'd been all over with him; I'd gone up in the night column with him, shared a slit trench with him when the shelling was hot.

The next few days were quiet except for artillery barrages and daily Stuka raids. Then we advanced for a second big drive. The next day and night we hauled back seven hundred wounded. Those with minor injuries---shrapnel in limbs, shoulders, or thighs --- lay on stretchers outside the ADS. They lay in the hot sun and waited patiently, smoking, resting, and joking (though their pain was not funny), till the Doctors could find time for them. Stukas raided the area while they lay there.

A Jerry prisoner, wounded in the leg, watched it all calmly, didn't try to take cover. Bill Thomas asked him,

"How do you like it?"

"What's the difference", the Jerry groaned, "our planes, your planes... our bombs, yours ... they're all the same .. nobody likes them. Nobody likes war. But we get guns instead of butter. We're sent away to the desert instead of home. It 's always been so in Germany ... guns instead of butter."

Then he stopped. The weariness of his thought wore down his voice to a thin edge. "What's the use? What's..." And he stopped altogether. He lay there and pushed his hands through his graying hair.

Down at the MDS, waiting for the staff to find a place to put the wounded and clear our ambulances, we met another German. He was complaining about the bully beef and biscuits they'd captured at Matruh. Having captured the stuff, now they had to eat it.. He rambled on about the war, about the battles hold been in, about how they froze up in Russia. The war seemed his world: it was all he knew.

Finally, l asked him bluntly, "What do you want out of this war? Why are you fighting?"

He gave a straightforward answers " Ah vant to get homes, he said. "Ah vant to get home . . dot's vot all de Germans vant."

To those who have known McMeekan on the Broadway Stage, the following will be of special interest.

Mind you, I'm not saying that the twenty-four hours hereinafter described are typical for the American Field Service men at the front. But there was never a day that one or two of the component incidents did not occur, sometimes an unhealthy combination of several, and all too often we got the whole kit and caboodle. One such day came in mid-July.

From the moment we (seven men, five ambulances) took over from Dave Hume's section we were up to our necks in war. We had smugly considered ourselves old timers after Tobruk, but when those first shells began landing around the RAP . . .

An RAP is the first aid unit attached to a fighting battalion. It is usually mounted on a truck, extremely mobile, following close on the heels of the battalion no matter where it goes. They try to park in the lee of a rise, screening it from the enemy. In this way it escapes machine-gun fire. But that's about all it misses of the Jerry parcels. With the exception of the arm bands of the stretcher bearers, you can not push the Red Cross any farther forward. From the RAP the casualties are carried by ambulance back to the ADS, which serves all the battalion RAPs in the Brigade. This unit is usually about a mile further back, and is only in a slightly less dangerous position, situated as it usually is in the vicinity of the artillery --- the inevitable Stuka target. The function of the ADS is to re-dress wounds, perform superficial operations, and, when time is the saving factor, to perform amputations. After that, the patients are raced back to the MDS, where the surgical wonders are performed. Later, the wounded me are ferried back to a base hospital. But it's that first five or six miles that really count. Our subsection job was to bring the wounded out from five battalion RAPs and, after they were properly attended to, to carry them on back to the MDS. This sounds simple, but it becomes somewhat more complicated when you understand that the territory we were working was the target of almost constant machine-gunning, shelling, and Stuka raiding.

The desert always reminded me of that rhyme about the little girl with the spit-curl in the middle of her forehead:

"And when she was good she was very good,
But when she was bad she was horrid."

The morning of that day in mid-July was good, very good. I mean by that, when the sun broke over the escarpment to the east it sifted through the low-lying mist that spread above the wadis and the rock-strewn, rolling sand, washing it with all the colors of a Bedouin scarf. The heavy dew of the night held the blowing sand close to the earth. It was a cool and comfortable desert we woke up in. We kicked out of the blankets, pulled on shoes, threw water in our faces, and grabbed the mess gear. There was bacon, biscuits, and tea at the cook truck, and we were hungry.

And then --- throb, throb, throb, "Heads up, Jerry planes." "Wait a minute, maybe they're ours." No, there go the Bofors, dozens of them, whacking away, five whacks to the clip. Get moving . . . find a slit trench . . . some one in that one . . . find another. There's one, not too deep, not too shallow. In you go, and now you can look. There they are, and you count . . nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Twenty-one. that's going to hurt. They're coming in a broken formation, sort of wagging and turning. the ack-ack is breaking in little puffs all about, among, and between. On they come in that funny unconcerned way, but suddenly there is purpose and determination in the quickly forming line, and the first plane starts down. Now the wing-whistles sound with an ever increasing shriek. Another begins the descent, and then another, and another, till they're all on their way down with all the banshees of hell screaming. Then a new sound faintly knifes its way into the scream, - whistle, high and light, that sharpens and then broadens until it ends with a cracking, roaring rumble. Soon there is no beginning or end to the screams, whistles, roars, and rumbles, but there is a mighty crescendo of sound as if some Juggernaut were speeding over wooden bridges. When it's over, the Bofors are still whacking away and the planes are winging toward the enemy lines. High above, six little fighter planes with circles on their wings come down in a power dive. By the time the RAF reach their targets, though, they are beyond our vision. And we have to look to our job.

Two thousand yards away, stretching along an eighth of a mile atop the escarpment, a line of dusty mushrooms, huge and frightening, grow up from the earth, and interspersed among their roots are burning vehicles and blasted ground. That's where our job is. How many ambulances are ready? Buck Kahlo, at his wheel, is moving over fast. Al Savage and Don Gibson are running to their ambulances. Buck swings his door open as he moves past, and I'm in, and we're on our way. The thing to look for is a little knot of soldiers. Somewhere in the center, one will be prone, twisting with agony. Our rear doors are opened before we stop rolling. A stretcher is out, the wounded man is lifted on, and we move off looking for another. We are fortunate to find only two. The other ambulances seem to have covered the rest of the burned earth.

We go back to the tents, where the doctors signal hope. The rest of our boys come in, and the casualties total seven. Now is the time to talk things over, to thank our lucky stars that the planes weren't any closer. Word seeps through the grapevine that the Bofors did get one that none of us saw fall, and that the Kittyhawks accounted for two more.

We were overdue to relieve the boys who had been out at the RAPs for twelve hours. We started up front with two relief ambulances. As we passed the 25-pounders, they opened up at some target that only the observer, moving about on the ridge in his little half-tonner, could see. When they start cracking just beside you, with no warning, it gives you a bit of a start. We went on and were just pulling up behind the infantry, looking for the RAP and Bob Headley's ambulance, when the Bofors started in again. The roar of the motor had made us completely unaware that the Stukas were on us. We jammed on the brakes, saw a slit trench to our right, and leapt in. The planes flew a bit closer this time. No sooner had they gone than we drove for the spot where several vehicles were clustered. One of them was an AFS ambulance and it looked, somehow, drooping and wounded. It was. Great shrapnel holes punctured the entire front; it was smoking, and there was Dave Hyatt pumping a fire extinguisher into the engine.

Every type of vehicle---Bren Carriers, armoured cars, trucks, jeeps ---was bringing wounded in to this RAP. Not twenty yards away from me stood a German truck, an Opel, loaded with wounded of the Afrika-korps. A Kiwi had just driven it inside our lines when the Stukas got him. After we loaded our ambulances and they started back to the ADS, I stepped into the Opel and began fiddling with the strange dashboard. Finally, lights flashed and there were great mutterings from the cowl. Today, the Opel is a unit in the AFS fleet of trucks.

We still had to relieve the RAPs.. We were approaching the position where the Stukas had interrupted us when the whine of shells brought us up sharply. The shells were bursting just ahead, in the approximate vicinity of Headley. There was no use trying to go forward until the barrage ceased and it was wise to be cautious in case Jerry lifted his sights a bit; so we dove into slit trenches again. We were worried about Headley, for many shells dropped in the small area that included him and the RAP. They missed him, luckily, but there were too many others that weren't missed. Duncan Murphy was left to hold down the job there, and we took the wounded back to the white tents. At the other RAP, where we relieved Savage, things were comparatively quiet for e change. This post had started with ten men at the beginning of the two-week-old campaign; five of the originals were still living.

By the time we arrived back at the ADS, the line was forming at the cook truck. We walked by in turn, the dinner was scooped into our mess tins, and we scattered. Stuka pilots have a penchant for the grub wagon at meal time. Sure enough, they were over again. The difference in your reaction to one bombing from another is in direct ratio to its propinquity. Frankly, my memory is somewhat faulty as to what happened in the next few minutes, because this time there was no doubt that the Jerrys had chosen us for their target. I only know that somehow I got into a trench and that as the screams and whistles and roars fused into a gigantic, hellish sound my fingernails were tearing at the earth, my mouth and lungs were choking with dust from my trying to chew my way farther into the ground. I do remember that the blast from one bomb knocked a twenty-pound rock off the lip of my rat-hole down onto me, and that a soldier weighing, roughly, two-hundred pounds decided there was room enough for the two of us in there and, with tin hat clanking, landed mostly on the small of my back. At that point I thought I had discovered what it meant to be the victim of a direct bomb-hit. But Bombs don't talk, and I heard a muttered, "Oh, my God, oh, my God". Then, as suddenly as it began, it was all over, but this time there was no rush to our vehicles, for now we were in the roots of the huge mushrooms. I lay there, unable to move, because I was unbelievably weak, and frightened. My heart beats were like the pulsing of a Diesel engine. I was plastered with mud composed of dust and my fear-inspired sweat.

But I was unhurt, and I knew there was work to be done, and I stuck my head up. All about me, men with blackened faces and dust-covered bodies were climbing out of their holes in the earth. For two or three minutes you couldn't see twenty feet for the dust that blanketed the tents and vehicles. But the breeze rapidly cleared the area, and we began to look about. We walked around the huge holes where smoke was curling up. Fifty feet away, a truck was perforated with shrapnel. Yet no one, not one person in this unit, was touched. At the other end of the bombed area, a few hundred yards away, lorries were burning and the little human knots were forming. But we were all alive, unscathed.

Once again, that day, the Stukas came over and, in their wake, the Heinkels. Their target was far enough away that we could stand and watch the bombs leave the bays, and start down. It was the last bombing of the day. But we were to know other varieties of danger before the day was over.

One battalion had been out off from the rest of the brigade since the night before. There was a hole through to them, but only armoured vehicles were able to reach their position. The hole was widened during the day so that ambulances could got in to bring out the wounded. Just as the sun was dropping into the Western horizon, word came that we were to go through. The route was precarious, twisting and flanked on either aide by obscurely marked minefields. There was every indication that the trip back would have to be accomplished in darkness. Three ambulances were on hand at the moment; the drivers were Savage, Gibson, and Lee Kyle, who, though he belong to our section and was under no obligation to accompany us, was just as keen as the others to go. For a guide, we had a man who had made the trip three times. It took perhaps twenty minutes to reach our objective, and another fifteen to lead the casualties in to the ambulances. By that time darkness had set in, and we faced the trip back with definite forebodings. The guide was in the first car with Savage, Gibson was next, and Kyle and I brought up the rear. There is no point in trying to explain how or why it happened that we lost our way, but lose it we did. That fact came to our attention rather sharply when, after progressing perhaps five- hundred yards over minefield, our ambulance blew up. I am hard put to tell you exactly what that means, for I was momentarily blinded by the flames, and I am still somewhat deaf from the explosion. I have a slight recollection of the front end leaping into the air and returning to the blast-pit with a wrenching jar. experts later congratulated us, saying that the mines, intended for blasting tanks, had luckily burst forward instead of coming through the floor board. We were quite badly shaken, and extremely worried about the men on the stretchers, who had been thrown from their hangers. The drivers forward had heard the explosion and become aware of their dangerous position. Smartly, they halted. They followed their tracks back and arrived at our ambulance as we were unloading the wounded men. The rest of the incident was a nightmare; we carried the men on stretchers out of the minefield, backtracking and hoping to heaven that we'd miss the mines; and then two New Zealanders, waiting at the edge of the field, came beak with us and helped us dig up mines end, inch by inch, move the ambulances over the cleared ground to safety.

It must have taken hours, and it seemed like years. Finally, we got the wounded men crowded into the two remaining ambulances, drove them out of probable range of Jerry patrols, and waited until dawn to regain our bearings. When we pulled into our base, there was breakfast waiting, and we ate it, but almost lost it shortly thereafter when the nervous reaction set in. We were grateful for the waiting blankets.

You've probably read a lot about Tobruk, including what it was like to live there, but to set the table for this tasty spread we'll review briefly concerning some of the aspects of our life there.

The majority of the men had the long haul to Bardia daily. That meant something over two hundred miles for the round trip, and with the loading and unloading of patients and so on, the men were lucky to return to the AFS camp on an escarpment above Tobruk by late afternoon,--- just about in time for dinner.

They dug their mess tins out of duffle bags. Because there was very little water for any purpose, the mess tins could seldom be washed clean, and grease filmed them somewhat thicker day by day. Holding the tins at an angle, against the dust-filled wind, the men lined up outside the cook tent. The line perforce moved slowly. Dinner was at an early hour and the sun was still hot and the men sweated. Finally they scuffed inside the tent. Mess tins filled, they returned outdoors to look about for friends to squat down beside. The food ( an average meal) consisted of Bully-beef stew, soggy boiled potatoes, boiled marrow, stewed prunes, and tea. And sand.

Always, in the clusters of men, there'd be some talking nostalgically about meals at home. Many must have thought about meals at home. But one man went further. He reflected long and carefully and he set the product of his thought on paper.

Weeks later, we rested the folded, pocket-worn slip of paper from him. We now copy, word for word and punctuation mark for punctuation mark, the writing on it.

The man who planned this menu is witty and gracious John Meeker. He now, as Captain Ives put it, "considers himself a part of the Desert, and is very happy as such".

When John no longer is a part of the Desert, when he is one day in 52nd Street, in "21", we hope to find him ordering the above dinner . . . and asking us to sit down.

(This Department is likely as not to appear regularly in the NEWS BULLETIN. Its function is to present information of a sort regarding AFS officers.)

When asked for biographical material, ROBERT WICKLIFFE PRESTON JOHNSTON, of Lexington, Kentucky, jerked his head back. His glistening blue eyes popped. His jaw sagged. He said,

"I declare, I'm being interviewed !"

Nobody disputed that; so he went on, blurting the words,

"I am the second son of devoted parents; I am twenty-two; I wear Abercrombie and Fitch twenty-two-dollar shoes. But my feet still hurt me some. I like blonds."

Johnston had a happy childhood, he told us be read all of the Rover Boy stories and entered the University of Kentucky. There, he was enrolled in the School of Agriculture, which made pretty good sense, because his life's ambition is to be a farmer. Johnston once explained to us how he would farm:

"Ah'll have a poach built all the way around the house", he said, "So's I can look out on all the fields and see if the work's being done all right." That, too, seemed to make pretty good sense.

After only one year, however, in the University of Kentucky, Johnston transferred to the University of Virginia, where for three years he attended the Arts School and received his B. A. degree. "How did that fit into your plans, your life's ambition?" we asked and Johnston quickly said "Don't worry; everything'll be all right."

In the Fall of '41, he was admitted into the famed Law School of the University of Virginia. We asked how this was a step farther towards his life's ambition of becoming a farmer; and he said, "Don't worry; everything'll be all right".

Johnston remained in the Law School for several weeks. Then he volunteered for the AFS Middle East Forces, was accepted, and on November 6th, sailed on the WEST POINT.

He shuffled onto the gangplank of the WEST POINT as nothing more or less than an OR, which is Other Ranks, or --- more briefly--- Others. But this gave Johnston that all-American chance to build an up-from-the-ranks career in the best tradition. He made some progress on board ship. As he summed it up, "I acted as assistant to Fred Hoeing and got dysentery."

Once in the field (in late winter, in Syria), Johnston was named NCO at the large and important post in the coastal city of Tripoli. "There," he said, "I was in charge of thirteen jokers and thirteen ambulances" And it was there that he began what has turned out to be an almost incessant muttering of, "Don't worry; everything'll be all right"

While he was at the Tripoli post, Johnston's immediate OC was Lieutenant C.B. Ives. Which was most fortunate for one of them. Their close association in the service has continued to this very day, and Ives, without doubt, has heard the muttered, "Don't worry everything'll be all right", more than any living man. He has heard it even during Johnston's sleep. The Ives Theory about this muttered assurance is that serious and conscientious Johnston is a great worrier and repeats the sentence all the while to keep up his own spirits. The fact is, however, that Johnston goes on repeating it even now, when, as OC of A Platoon in Syria, he has no worries whatsoever.

But, let us not get ahead of our story. . . .

It was April and it was cold and rainy and Johnston was still NCO at Tripoli. Then it was May and it was El Tahag and there was a bright sun and s thermometer reading of 112 in the shade and a new company, "X" (AFS) ACC, was formed and there, in A Platoon, was Johnston. But Sergeant Johnston. He had upped in the platoon whose OC was the same Lt C.B. Ives. Once again, this association was to prove fortunate for one of them.

From May to August, from El Tahag to Tobruk to Tents to the White Thistle, Johnston daily worked long and hard, carrying on as Platoon Sergeant. It has been said by some that he carried so many of the platoon's burdens on the slightly rounded shoulders of his husky body that that was why he never shifted the gears of his motor cycle higher than second. When questioned regarding the matter, Johnston, plainly surprised, gulped and said

"Second? No wonder that cycle like to scare me to death. All the time I thought I was in low."

From May to August. . . .Time Marches On . . . . It is the forenoon of August second, nineteen-hundred and forty-two. In a smoke-blurred, sparsely and crudely furnished room in GHQ MEF, Cairo, Egypt, officers with heavily laden shoulder tabs bend over a table. These high-ranking officers have their heads close together. Their voices buzz, tense, high-pitched. Suddenly, there is a lull. The officers' hands are darting eagerly towards the center of the table

One officer watches the eager hands; he wipes off the sweat fast-beading his forehead; shakily, he reaches for a glass of water. Then, as the hands are withdrawn, this officer reaches toward the center of the table. He picks up the small paper packet there, peeks in it, crumples it. Silently, bitterly, he tells himself what he thinks of himself for exposing a pack of Chesterfields. But there is work to be done, grave issues are to be decided, the very fate of the Middle East is hanging in the balance; and he must carry one He says,

"Thompson", hoarsely, and takes another sip of water. He clears his throat. "Thompson", he says, "prepare this notice."

We quote from paragraph 7 of the official pronouncements

"Sergeant Johnston will assume the rank of Lieutenant, will proceed to Beirut, where he will take over command of A Platoon."

You remember the old 47th Street Palace? And the much sought after next-to-closing spot?

Well, ladies and gentlemen, here it is,--- featuring those inimitable jesters, those favorites of Africa, Asia, and American, TUG and WILLIE in

Don't be alarmed if you hear that AFS men have taken the veil. For some reason, unknown to us, there has been a flurry of financial headgear among our numbers . . . . sinister little table-cloths tied around the face, Arab-fashion, doubtless worn to attract the eye of Middle East debutantes (What was that again? ---Ed.) Unfortunately, the headgear has also attracted the eye of several Important Officers who don't seem to share the opinion that the AFS should carry on as if attired for a Bal Masqué. An AFS member from Boston burst into the office swathed in something that looked like an hysterical wimple. "What does he think he is", growled some one, "a Bey?" "A Back Bey", said John Wyllie.

Our new Workshops, up in Syria, are very imposing. Under Lieutenant Mathewson's eagle eye the air is now ringing with the clinkings and clankings of tires being changed, and on all sides one can see happy faces peering into motors with little exclamations of, "Oh, is THAT the distributor?", and, "Your generator, old boy, is miserable" We did hear that some ambitious youth poured nearly four gallons of oil into the engine, because, as he explained, "the needle on the oil gauge persisted in stopping at the half-way mark". But such blunders are rare indeed, and you must admit this boy was willing. Tom Morris was heard to mutter darkly that he'd bet he could get his Letter from Socony station any day, and Captain Ives avowed himself on more than intimate terms with an exhaust pipe. Life over here is not all driving through shock and shell, and we have more than a passing sympathy for the lad who, brandishing a grease-gun, exclaimed "Well, here I go . . . . weaning that damned ambulance again !" Just before we left Workshops this morning, the staff car was driven in by Joe Latham. He was wearing coveralls. "Hmmm," said a Tommy fitter, "got his play-suit on".

We were happy to welcome four new men from America. One, Don Chidsey, hails from Tahiti, surely our most distant fellow worker. Mr. Chidsey is a writer, thus swelling our literary flank. Indeed, today we received word that three more writers are on the way: the AFS is gradually assuming the appearance of a Journalistic Congress. Some of them profess to be writing books about this Great Adventure, and it is quite imperative to be continually gracious lest one be relegated to a foot-note.

As the fall hurries on we are mindful that Battle-dress-time draws near. Lest Willie's mother think that this means her boy is about to go off to battle, we hasten to explain that battle-dress is a particularly uncomfortable (but warm) garment of a rich, dark brown color, calculated to counter the wintry winds but also conducive, the first few days of wearing, to a sort of itching motion that gives appearance of a continuous Harlem shuffle. From the advertisements in the occasional American magazines lying about we observe that all the tailors back home are displaying the latest styles in uniform. But how we yearn for a picture of a good Brooks Brothers three button herringbone! Please, Mr. dePinna, are shirts to be striped or plain this season? And if any one so much as mentions olive-drab when we get home there'll be trouble . . .

Willie, in the words of an immortal American lyricist, is 'bidin' his, time'.

On reading an article, clipped from the New York DAILY MIRROR, telling of the sailing of a valiant group of AFS men "some near-sighted, some lame", but. . . "a cargo more precious than gold", the following poem was inspired:

AFS News Bulletin, No. 3

Index