One Man's War: Deserted In The Desert (Part 1)

**Al Murray** (0:09)
You got very tired, at the end of the day, you were very, very tired. The desert is in all sand. You get desert with scrub, with waddies, with big black rocks, even when a tank is difficult to get through. You'd look for a place with the least amount of stones at the end of the day, but sometimes you were so tired, you wouldn't even scrape the stones away with your foot.
Just throw my groundsheet down and drop down on it. You never took your clothes off. At night it got quite cold. Sometimes you'd fold a tanksheet lengthways and put that down. When you were in more settled places, not in a combat zone, some people would make quite a decent shelter with tanksheets and camouflage netting. Some people slept underneath the tank, but you did always have the slit trench because our air support was tragic. And that was me, Al Murray, ventriloquizing Sam Bradshaw, whose story we will be telling. So welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray and James Holland, where what we've decided to do is go away from the big arrows on the maps and the grand schemes and the high politics or the factories churning out not enough trucks or too many types of trucks and all the things that we've been concerning ourselves in recent episodes and look at one individual. Jim, we've chosen Sam Bradshaw, who, as I'm sure people realize, is from Liverpool.
I kind of pitched an Andy Burnham Liverpool rather than a Harry Enfield countdown thing.

**James Holland** (1:35)
Personally, I thought that was very strong and I thought you did it magnificently. And actually it did sound quite a lot like Sam, who I met 20 odd years ago and he was just a lovely, lovely bloke and I talked to him a number of times, got to know him very well, visited him several times in his house in Wigan and he was just very articulate and thoughtful about his experiences in the war, which were extensive, frequently traumatic and just fascinating. I mean, really, really fascinating. And of all the hundreds of interviews I've done with Second World War veterans, he's definitely top five. I mean, he's one of those ones where it just sticks. You just remember it. You remember the stories. You remember the things he was telling you. You can remember him sitting in his armchair telling these stories. When we were thinking about kind of homing in on one person's experience, he was one of the first people that came to my mind. We're going to start with November 1941, Operation Crusader. The newly formed Eighth Army is doing its attack to relieve to Tobruk, Pushpak Rommel's Italian German Forces in the desert.
And he is by this time a Lance Corporal in the 6th Royal Tank Regiment, the RTR. And on the 21st of November, he is in the Western Desert in Libya, about 20 miles east of Tobruk.

**Al Murray** (3:05)
Crusader is a big operation with lots pinned on it, isn't it? This is the thing. This is a big, if we just briefly talk about That's going to address the balance in North Africa and knock the Germans out, isn't it? There's a lot of hope pinned on this, isn't it?

**James Holland** (3:23)
Yes. I mean, let me do a kind of one minute pricey. So basically September, 1940, Italian army pushes into Egypt. the British Western Desert for under General Dick O'Connor, only 46,000 strong, pushes back, is much more mobile, defeats the Italians in Operation Compass in December 1940 into January and February 1941, at which point Germans think, oh my God, what's going to happen here? We're going to lose our soft underbelly, some front, so we better send some reinforcements. So sends over Major General Erwin Rommel, as he is at that point in February 1941, with two Panzer divisions, which then become three and joins in with the Italians. And they do stop the British. And this is because in the spring of 1941, large part of the Western Desert forces, it still is, then gets diverted to help the Greeks because the Germans have already invaded the Balkans and in April 1941 invade Greece as well. So that critically weakens them. At that point in April 1941, Dick O'Connor and General Neame are captured by the Germans and the British are pushed back. Then there is, in the summer, there's Operation Battle Axe, where they try to push back again, doesn't really work. Tobruk is overrun and so begins the siege of Tobruk.
And from the spring of 1941 onwards, Battle Axe, which is supposed to relieve Tobruk, doesn't work. So then it's a rethink. And in all this time, everyone's kind of reinforcing and reinforcing. And what was the Western Desert for becomes British Eighth Army in the autumn of 1941