The Ack Ee's Grave

`9BAD the a.e.'s grave' (a.e. being pronounced `ack ee') translation: `number nine Base Ammunition Depot, Abu Sultân in the Suez Canal Zone of Egypt, a very bad posting !' I can clearly remember a cartoon showing a signpost reading `9 BAD' with a vulture perched on it, which was prominently displayed in one of the classrooms at the School of Ammunition, Bramley Ammunition Depot, in Hampshire. The implication being that this was the last place on earth to which one would wish to get a posting.

Postings were allocated according to one's results in the thirteen or so examinations that were taken as part of the Ammunition Examiner's course. The top student was allowed to choose the plum posting, and so on down the list of results. My result wasn't bad: one could qualify as Class 2 or Class 3 examiner, and having a good result I gained Class 2, which put me above half way up the list of 25 or so students. Upon seeing the results the smile was soon wiped from my face when I saw the list of possible postings. Over half the class were to go to 9BAD!

So that's how I found myself landing in the Canal Zone in a beat up York transport plane one week before Christmas, 1952. As I stepped from the plane it felt as if I'd stepped into an oven. 9BAD certainly lived up to its reputation, hell with sand! Half the camp inmates lived in tents, ablutions and washing - up taking place outside using cold taps over concrete benches with a gutter running down the centre. When one dared to brave a shower, as often as not it was in cold water. The food was atrocious - the last breakfast before leaving I got a piece of bacon, which looked unusually lean. On close inspection it proved to be a praying mantis, perfectly fried!

The Commanding Officer and Regimental Sergeant Major were complete nut cases, as were half the non- commissioned officers. The following amply illustrates this point. Normally we arose very early in the morning and worked until midday. The idea being that one tried to avoid the hottest part of the day. The CO decided that he didn't like the idea of his troops having free time in the afternoons, so instituted a cross-country run in the desert for those not on duty. He and the RSM drove around in a Land Rover, urging the runners on with dire threats of charges for any stragglers! God help anyone daring to die of heat stroke!

Ammunition depots, due to their nature, consist of widely dispersed storage buildings surrounded by blast walls - in this case huge banks of sand and soil. Most of the time I worked in an ammunition `laboratory'. These were large buildings, also fairly isolated. A narrow gauge railway brought the ammunition to the laboratories for inspection and repair. A kind of assembly line was set up in the laboratory using portable gravity rollers. At one end the ammunition was unpacked and put onto the rollers, where it was pushed along to the next stage. This may involve a visual inspection, or in some cases stripping down for examination and repair. For example the gravity rollers might go through a hole into a blast proof chamber built of boxes filled with sand. In this cell an ammunition examiner might put a shell into a special padded vice, remove the fuse with a tool designed for the job, examine the contents and remove say a split exploder bag with a brass tool, replace the exploder and refit the fuse.
Often one knew that this was a waste of time, as not having a special tool to compress the exploder before fitting the fuse, it would probably split open again when the fuse was screwed in on top of it. The shell was then put back on the gravity roller and sent out of the blast proof cell.

After being examined the ammunition was reboxed and sealed with a cloth seal bearing an ammunition examiner's number using a solution of shellac in meths.

I remember one job we had very clearly. Quite a lot of the ammunition we examined consisted of a steel shell attached to a brass cartridge case filled with propellant, such as cordite. The firing mechanism for this cordite was in the base of the brass case - imagine a very large bullet.

One of the jobs we had to do was to check these cartridge cases in a steel gauge, to make sure that they weren't bulged or deformed, and would fit into the breech of the gun. Unfortunately all our gauges were worn and damaged, so the Inspecting Ordnance Officer (IOO) decided to have a gun barrel, complete with breech mechanism brought to the laboratory so that we could use it to gauge the shells.

The job went as follows: Egyptian labour unpacked the shells under supervision, and put them on a wooden tray on the gravity roller. Alongside the line was the gun barrel on metal stands. I took the rounds off the trays, one at a time, and put them into the gun breech, giving them a final push with the heel of my hand. As the breechblock slammed up it threw my hand out of the breech. I then pulled down on a handle designed to open the breech and eject the empty shell after firing. This would in theory eject the full unfired round. A very large East African Pioneer Corps member called Joseph stood by the breech to catch the round as it was ejected and to put it back on the gravity roller for further processing.

In practice, what often happened was that the shell jammed in the barrel rifling, and the cartridge casing was ejected at high speed, spinning wildly past Joseph scattering a curtain of cordite pellets as it went, and ended up bouncing end over end across the concrete floor. An Egyptian labourer swept up the cordite into a huge heap in the corner of the laboratory. The problem now, of course, was getting the shell out of the gun barrel. This involved putting a long pole down the barrel and pushing it out by the fuse!

The Suez Canal was built between 1859 and 1869 by Vicomte Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps. It runs from the Mediterranean Sea to the Gulf of Suez - an arm of the Red Sea. It is 163 km (101 miles) long and passes through three lakes: Lake Manzala, lake Timsah and the Great and Little Bitter Lakes. (The Great and Little Bitter Lakes are really one large lake with a constriction in the middle) Until being nationalised in 1956 by President Gamel Abdel Nasser, it was owned by the `Universal Company of the Maritime Suez Canal' or the `Suez Canal Company' for short.

General Muhammad Naguib deposed Egyptian ruler King Faruk in 1952, just before I arrived. Neguib wanted the British army out of Egypt and pressure was being applied by a series of acts of terrorism against British troops. Because the canal was of great strategic value, particularly as the Korean War was taking place at the time, Britain was resisting leaving.

Part of our defences at the time was a squadron of Centurion tanks stationed at a place on the Little Bitter Lake called Shandur. These tanks, manned by various regiments in rotation, were being taken over whilst I was there by a regiment: The Fifth Royal Enniskillen Dragoon Guards - `The Skins', who had just completed a tour of service In Korea.

I was sent on attachment with two more ammunition examiners, another lance corporal and a sergeant, to sort out the ammunition for these tanks. Every time the tanks were loaded up with ammunition, then unloaded again, the ammunition, mainly twenty pounder shells, took a terrible beating. Shell cases got dented, cases became loose on the shells and, more importantly, batches got mixed up. Shells are made in batches, and each batch has slightly different characteristics, which affect the performance when fired. To try to ensure that every shell fired hits the same target, the shells used are kept together in their particular batches. Mixing shells from different batches obviously affects performance.

The job was scheduled to take fourteen days. Because the ammunition was in such a mess it lasted fourteen weeks! We had to remove badly damaged rounds, organise cleaning corroded cartridge cases with emery paper, sort out ammunition into batches, rebox and seal.

We were billeted with the regimental `misfits' during this time. After the rough living in Korea, the powers that be were trying to instil some regimental discipline with some `spit and polish', and we had to be kept out of sight. during parades, inspections and other events. Our billet had a Scots guy who'd been in the Guardroom cells so often that he was eventually made into a Regimental Policeman. Another bloke drove a half-track truck on various odd jobs and specialised in turning it round in its own length. The most interesting fellow though was the chap who dug the regimental toilets. These consisted of a hole in the ground with wooden seats placed over it. When this had been used for some time, the hole was refilled and a new one dug. Our roommate boasted that whilst in Korea he'd dug the deepest latrine trench ever, thirty or forty feet deep! Apparently the brass from all over Korea had gathered to admire his efforts.

We quite enjoyed our time with the `Skins', and on our final evening with them had a real boozy celebration drinking the powerful Egyptian Stella biere blonde and a bottle of rum our sergeant had got us from the sergeant's mess. I don't remember a lot about that evening, except for flashes of consciousness. In one of these I remember wandering in the sandy waste, trying to find a way to break the rum bottle, as spirits were strictly off limits for any rank less than sergeant.

On returning to Abu Sultân I was informed that I'd been `volunteered' for a special assignment. Useless and dangerous ammunition was usually transported to the demolition ground for disposal with explosives. Apparently there was a lot of ammunition awaiting treatment in this way, sixty tons to be precise, but it was considered too dangerous to transport over the bumpy desert to the demolition ground. It had been decided to load it onto a landing barge crewed by seven Egyptians, at the Great Bitter Lake, take it up the canal and sea dump in the Mediterranean. Accompanied by a private Lambert, with a Short Magazine Lea Enfield rifle and bandolier with fifty rounds apiece, my job was to look after the ammunition on its way up the canal to Port Said, take on board a platoon of Pioneer Corps, and supervise the sea dump.

When I arrived back at my tent from the ammunition dump, a corporal bearing a clipboard with about thirty pages on it approached me. "Sign for this lot", he said. "What am I signing for", I asked. "Sixty tons of ammunition", he replied. "Good God, I haven't even seen it yet", I said. "Don't worry, its going to be dumped" was his reply. His final remark rather unsettled me: "the Egyptian rice (foreman) who acts as skipper has family in Ismâiliya. Don't let him put in there or you'll lose the lot".

That evening Lambert And I were driven to the landing stage on the Great Bitter Lake by a warrant officer in a Landrover. "Have you signed for the ammunition?", he asked. "Yes", I said. "Have you checked it?", he said. "No sir, this is the first time I've seen it", I replied."Hm, well I suppose that it doesn't matter", he said thoughtfully. "Now corporal, there's something you ought to know. We had some leaking white phosphorus shells that we wanted to get rid of. The Suez Canal Company said that they were too dangerous to transport up the canal, so we have buried them in the middle of all the other ammunition on the barge." I remembered the last time I'd seen white phosphorus disposed of using explosives at the demolition ground near Worksop during training. The ammunition depot fire brigade had been standing by for a whole week whilst they burned themselves out! My thoughts were interrupted by his next remark. "You'll be going on board and pulling out into the middle of the Great Bitter Lake until morning, then going up the canal".
"Why don't we stay here 'till morning, sir", I asked. His reply destroyed any peace of mind, which I might have left. "We can't risk an explosion destroying the wharf."

When Lambert and I got aboard, the Egyptian foreman/skipper made us very welcome. There were three cabins: one for him, one for the engineer and one where the other five crew slept. He insisted I have his cabin, he took the engineer's cabin, and Lambert slept in the communal cabin. I wedged the door, fastened my rifle to my wrist, and had a fairly sleepless night thinking about all the British troops who had been murdered in the Canal Zone.

The next morning we opened the box of food the camp had supplied us. It contained mainly tins with some sandwiches on top. As we opened the box dozens of cockroaches scuttled out of it to disappear in seconds. I looked at Lambert, he looked at me and I said well I'm hungry so I'm eating them, he quickly agreed, so we polished off the sandwiches.

The journey up the canal was interesting and uneventful as it happened. All shipping was cleared from the canal for our passage. Landing barges are very low in the water, so I was a bit worried at our exposed situation for snipers. Eventually we agreed to sit behind the two large winches, that raised and lowered the landing ramp at the front of the boat, this affording us some degree of cover.

When we arrived at Port Said, we were joined by the Pioneers, and went out into the Mediterranean a few miles off the shipping lanes. It was good fun removing the ammunition from its boxes and throwing it overboard. As the shells hit the water we could clearly see them spiralling down through the clear azure water to eventually disappear from view. The boxes went last, and although they had all been punctured to make them sink, we left a long trail floating in our wake. I sincerely hoped that we were well off any shipping lane, or that they would eventually sink.

When I got back to Abu Sultân I was put on `issue orders'. This meant wandering around the wastes of the ammunition depot with two Mauritian Pioneers locating store sheds with particular batches of ammunition. When we found the right store shed, I unlocked it, identified the particular batch, examined a percentage sample, resealed the boxes with my personal seal, and filled out the paperwork to say that the ammunition was fit to send out.

This was an easy job, which allowed me to work at my own pace, and gave me hours of spare time to sunbathe on top of the blast walls, the two Pioneers acting as lookouts. At this time I discovered that a good long lie in the sun is a damned good cure for a hangover!

I would very much like to hear from any ex-9BAD vets. Please contact me at canalvet@tonybriggs.me.uk

Tony Briggs
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