Aqaba 1949

By Eric ( Pony ) Moore ex Four Five Commando

Ah Aqaba! 45 Cdo was camped at Hodgson Camp at Port Foud wondering what we were going to do next, when on the 1st March 1949 we had to pack up and move to the dock area at Adabiya, just south of Port Suez, where we boarded HMS LST Reginald Kerr and headed down the Gulf of Suez. We thought that we were going to Aden, but when we sailed past Sharm Al Shaykh on our port side, we worked out that we were heading for somewhere else. We entered the Gulf of Aqaba and finally landed on the beach of the town between Aqaba and the border with Israel.

Setting up camp in a set of old mud brick buildings with no roofs about 4 miles inland from Aqaba town, we covered the roofs with our tent tops to make life easier. Over the next few days we dug deep slit trenches facing the Israeli border and manned them night and day. Across the border was one mud hut in Elat, the city that is there now but was not there in 1949. Some armed Israelis, who we kept a watch on, occupied the mud hut.

One day we received automatic machine gun fire from the Israelis across the border and we all stood to in the slit trenches. Over the next few days these attacks happened again and again. Colonel Palmer RM our Commanding Officer decided that he had had enough of this so he had all of the Bren guns in 45 Commando line up just inside of the Jordanian border facing the mud building in Elat. When we received automatic fire from the Israelis again, the order was given to open fire on the mud building and all the Bren guns fired at once (about 30 of them). Whether we killed any of the Israelis we don't know but we were not fired on again.

45 Commando RM was in Aqaba till about the 19th June 1949. During that time I visited the 'Red Rose City of Petra', which was a great experience for me, as I love visiting old ruins of the Greek and Roman era and it made my stay in Jordan worthwhile. I also was attached to the Arab Legion at a fort somewhere in the Jordanian Desert for two weeks as a signalman. The Jordanian soldiers were very smart in their uniforms and when on their camels. Of course at that time their Commanding Officer was the English officer "Glubb Pasha".

I never went into Aqaba and I don't think anybody else did either. We did go swimming but we had to be very careful of the sharks and barracuda that were in the Gulf. The heat there was very high and at one point it topped 140F. When you had a shower using cold water, it was hot. Opening a bottle of beer from the NAAFI meant you lost half the contents foaming out of the bottle. The heat haze was always about eight feet high and it was a very uncomfortable place to live. We were all very pleased when we finally left there.

The mountain behind Aqaba will probably still have the 'Union Jack' on its summit where one of our climbing teams placed it. We arrived back at Hodgson Camp on the 21st July 1949. On the 26th August 1949, we boarded the MV Georgic and sailed for Hong Kong with the rest of the 3rd Commando Brigade RM, to protect the colony against the Communist Chinese Army if they tried to invade the territory.

Eric (Pony) Moore
New Zealand
Oct 2000

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