Churchill addresses the 8th Army at Tripoli, February 1943 — weeks before Walter passed through the same country. © IWM (E 22258)
The journey from Iraq to the front was itself a journey. Walter flew to Cairo in January 1943, waited at 22 P.T.C. in Heliopolis for his posting, and then landed at Marble Arch — not the one in London, but the Arco dei Fileni on the Libyan coast, Mussolini’s imperial monument planted absurdly in the middle of the desert. The 8th Army had passed through it weeks before. Walter landed and drove west.
His unit was 25 M.R.S. — a mobile medical receiving station that moved constantly, following the front wherever it went. F/Sgt Smilies called it Culliman’s travelling circus. The laboratory moved in a trailer. Walter kept it running wherever it stopped.
The near-misses
Sfax, Tunisia · Spring 1943
Driving through what appeared to be open ground, Walter realised the vehicle had entered a live minefield. He reversed carefully. He noted it in the diary and moved on.
Tripoli · Early 1943
During an air raid, a 500lb bomb landed close enough to throw him across the room. He picked himself up entirely unharmed, and noted that too.
“There was also Dave Summers whom I met in the billet during the air raid — an old pal of mine whom I had not seen for some years.” Volume II — Tripoli, reuniting with an old friend in the middle of a bombing
Benghazi and beyond
In Benghazi, Walter found a captured Italian public health laboratory — extraordinarily well equipped, far better than anything he had been working with. He arranged to acquire a mobile trailer from it and ran into Norman House, an old Halton colleague, working there. Two men from the same training cohort, meeting in a captured building in a city recently taken from the enemy.
Tunisia was beautiful and terrible in equal measure. Olive groves and fields of poppies. A smallpox case at El Hencha that Walter handled personally. A Ralph Reader Gang Show at a rest camp by the sea. And, near Carthage in June 1943, a roadside moment: a convoy passing, and in it, Churchill and Eden. Walter waved.
By July 1943 the African campaign was over. Walter was at Castel Benito aerodrome near Tripoli, waiting for a flight. The next stop was Sicily.
There are two moments in these chapters where Walter could easily have died. He records both in the same matter-of-fact tone he uses for cricket scores and dance evenings. This is not bravado; it is simply how he wrote. The reader notices the near-misses more than Walter appeared to.
Volume II diary scan (PDF) Full transcription (PDF) Narrative version (PDF)