During the winter of 1947/8 an Avro Anson communication aircraft based on Malta was detailed to fly from Benina(The then RAF aerodrome at Benghazi in Cyrenaica) to Castel Benito which was the RAF base for Tripoli of Tripolitania -today's Libya.
Following the coast as it flew westward from Benina ,the Limping Annie (so-called for its slow speed and the uneven note of its twin engines) ran out of fuel and was obliged to force land. The pilot saw beneath him the ancient Roman city, long deserted, of Leptis Magna and knew that there was an army unit nearby so he put the aircraft safely down on the sand of the shores of the Mediterranean rather than risk the Sahara desert further inland.
This was one period of my own RAF service in the Mediterranean that I was not actually in Malta itself but at the North African staging post of Transport Command at Castel Benito, named after the Italian dictator Mussolini whose forces had occupied Libya before the British defeated them in 1943.
However , I was one of the party sent to recover the Anson. We made as best an artificial runway as we could under and in front of the aircraft and our Commanding Officer, Group Captain Kirkpatrick ( a famous fighter pilot in the defence of wartime Malta) attempted unsuccessfully fo fly the Annie out for she only rolled for a short distance before her wheels stuck in the sands and so it was decided to dismantle the mainplanes and take them and the fuselage back to Tripoli by land on one of what we called the "Queen Mary" transporters.
A new party with lifting gear would be assembled at base and we were to go back to Castel Benito the next day and so, setting an armed guard on the aircraft, we settled in to the army camp for the night after exploring the deserted ancient port from which, in a former more fertile Tripolitania, wheat had been shipped to Rome
The next morning we were informed by those who had guarded the aircraft that during the night the sea had risen by several feet and engulfed the lower parts of the aircraft before subsiding as quickly as it had heightened. We examined the fuselage and sure enough it had been swamped, though the water had by then drained away.The dismantled aircraft was finally taken back to Tripoli and stored in a corner of a hangar but by the time its repair began it was found that rats had eaten all the rubber off the electric cables and done other damage so that Annie never limped in the air again
Now though this aircraft belonged to the Malta base. all this happened on the North African coast to the south of the Maltese Archipelago. The Mediterrranean is almost tideless of course but many years later I was to witness this swelling of the sea on the coast of Malta itself. The phenomena is called the Marrobbio and gives me an excuse for another story of that title.
