C Company 16 DLI, No 1 Commando Pt 3

Supporting the attack with fire from the cliff area, the DLI men, perhaps naturally, assumed that the Germans had fired first. Judging from the following description, the DLI must have also been moving up the slope behind the Commandos.

Tom Tunney

‘I think this Jerry had a shot at them. He was only a few yards away and the other one he had a shot at him and he hit the Jerry in the wrist and he hit him in the leg. The Jerry got another one in and he hit him right in the groin.

‘Anyway, I was about 15 yards back and I went up, crawled up and this Commando he was lying and we couldn't do anything with him. Couldn't put a tourniquet on him on anything.’

This could well have been Jack Southworth--who made a full recovery and later went out to Burma with No 1 Commando. However, the wounded German Tunney describes was most probably one of the German snipers rather than the man who came forward to the white flag. The fog of war and the passage of over almost 60 years have taken their toll on the exact details, but this has to be the same incident.

‘And the Jerries held their fire. Anyway, we got this young 'un out--the young Jerry. We got him up and took him back and all the time this was going on there was never a shot fired. I think that might have saved our lives that--because we took him back.

‘He was only a young lad, a big tall lad, a Jerry, and he was sitting in this, like hole and he had his rifle and the bloody cartridge cases, you should have seen the buggers! He was in front, he was a sniper. He had us pinned down. If he saw a piece of grass going “Pssst!” The bloody bullets was coming over, you daren't move. Couldn't. I don't know why, but they thought they were French. They thought we were fighting our own Allies--but we bloody well weren't!’

This was the first German that most of the DLI men had ever seen face to face.

‘Um. Aye. And then afterwards, when we got caught and they took us back, we could see them all lined up, with bloody great machine guns, the lot. But there wasn't many of them. There wasn't all that many.’

Jack Southworth

‘Before becoming unconscious I was annoyed at not looking for the support of the first German who came to the white flag. The enemy always used two forward, with double that behind and double again on patrol--as this incident seemed to be to ascertain whether the area was clear for them to move into.

‘The OC wished me well and said that his Section had chased the enemy on the lower slope towards the road. I was taken to a hut and in the morning of 28/2/43, as your father said, it rained heavily.

‘The stretcher bearers told me that they picked up Germans as well. No one with a stretcher would be fired on. I was treated in the tunnel as Sedjenane and, still dopey, left in the evening, waking up at the first aid at Tabarka. The Doctor wondered why I was still in pain, until he saw that I'd been shot in the other foot which was unattended. Knowing that I had been in the tunnel, he asked me if I had seen any nurses. I had: there was a Q A nurse [Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service] in the tunnel, which was a surprise. It appeared that the tunnel had been mistakenly attacked and there had been casualties. This is what had worried the doctor.’