“Not many days after we had been at Kassassin, this cauldron seemed to boil over. That was the day the dreaded Kahmseen dropped like a blanket. I shall always remember my first experience of this terror from the interior wastes of Africa. The air came from the desert far inland, not from the Mediterranean as it usually did. Blistering not air, with minute particles of sand floating in their millions, floated through the sky, shutting out the perpetual blue, and turning the heavens into a mass of grey.

The first time it hit me, I felt as if someone had placed a smothering pillow over my face. It was almost impossible to breathe. I felt the red-hot air going up my nostrils and making me choke as it reached back of my throat. Huge sand-spouts wended their way from the earth to the sky in darkening wavy pillars, and when I saw them coming, I hurriedly dived out of their path. On one occasion I was too late, and was caught in a whirling column of sand, which torched me like the blast from a furnace, making me gasp frantically for breath.

In the evenings during Kahmseen, it was torture trying to get to sleep. I’d lie naked as the day I was born, with only a blanket below me to keep the sand off my body, and close my eyes, firmly determined to get some sleep. I’d sweat and sweat, the liquid oozing from the pores of my body like a slowly-pressed sponge and running in rivulets down the side of my stomach. Eventually, I’d manage to drop off for a few hours, only to awaken at dawn to find myself in a pool of my own perspiration, and so exhausted that I’d feel as if I hadn’t slept in years.
Once this terrible Kahmseen arrived, I soon learned that it was certain to last for at least three days. That was the minimum. That then was the country that my comrades and myself encountered and, consequently, our first battle was not against the Germans but against Mother Nature”.

Harold Moon’s recollection about desert warfare, from his entry to the BBC’s “WW2 – Peoples War” project.