CHAPTER NINE

A RESPITE FROM OPS

 

Two weeks after the Battle of El Alamein began my crew was granted a short leave. Johnny Devine, Danny Daniels and I were not keen to stay in Cairo so we went to the airport at Heliopolis, a suburb of Cairo, in the hope that we may be able to hitch a ride to Palestine. We met a pilot of the Free French Air Force. He was about to fly a fairly old type of French aeroplane called a Potex to Damascus, the capital of Syria. He invited us go with him.

Damascus claims to be the world's oldest city. It was the home of Cain and Abel and it could be said to be the birthplace of the Christian religion because the Apostle Paul lived there.Damascus once ruled an empire larger than the Roman Empire. It lay on the old silk trading route linking China and Europe.

Before World War I Damascus had long been in the Ottoman Empire of the Turks. It was taken by Allied Forces in October 1918 and after the war Damascus became the capital of the French mandated territory named Syria. After the fall of France in World War II Syria was controlled by the Free French.

The three of us stayed a couple of days in Damascus at a service hostel. We visited the famous silk and carpet markets in the casbah. The merchants were having a lean time because the war had brought international trade virtually to a standstill. Over the traditional hospitality of Turkish coffee with lemon syrup chaser, Merchants were happy to explain to us how their silks were produced. There were exquisite pieces. I only wished I could have had some means of getting some back to my mother in New Zealand.

From Damascus we hitch-hiked with a British military courier to Beirut in Lebanon . After a day there we carried on hitch-hiking with the British military south through Sidon, Tyre and Acre to Haifa in Palestine. We went on through Tel Aviv, the new Jewish city in Palestine, then to Jerusalem and on to Bethlehem. There we visited the Church of the Nativity and saw the manger in the crypt where Christ was born. We left Bethlehem still hitch hiking with the army through Hebron and across the barren Neger and Sinai deserts to the Suez Canal zone in Egypt.

The Palestine sector of our journey was, of course, before the post-war creation of the state of Israel. There was, however, a significant Jewish population there, especially in the city of Tel Aviv. While relations between the Palestinian Arabs and the Jews appeared to be somewhat distant, there was no open conflict during the period of World War II while the country was under British mandated control.