Robert Crisp (1911–1994)

Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance

In December 1966, with his marriage over, his sons able to look after themselves the 55 year old Robert Crisp decides it is time to change his life and have a new start. Robert Crisp had a reputation as a hero, winning the Military Cross during World War 2, a former South African test cricketer, writer and journalist. Sometimes referred to as a ladies’ man, who was a serial womaniser, but founded The Drum newspapers for the Black Majority in Apartheid South Africa and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro twice. So not a man for sitting back and relaxing allowing life to pass him by.

So at 55 Robert Crisp moves to Greece, with Sixty Pounds in his pocket plus his war pension, he planned to write about his life out there. Through his writing appearing the Sunday Express, the readers learnt about his life in Greece, his hitchhiking to what was Yugoslavia, then a communist country. Even at his age he had a near disaster when he attempted to sail around Crete.

Towards the end of his first year in Greece he had severe stomach pain and was diagnosed with cancer, so he undertook to travel around Crete, with a donkey that has a personality that ordinarily set it out but both well matched. This donkey like Crisp was stubborn which at times turns this journey around Crete in to sometimes a comedic experience at times quite touching.

This book is a collection of those travels around Crete with said donkey, in what he thought was the last year of his life; he was to live another twenty years or so. The book has been edited by his estranged son, so that too must have been hard work.

This is an unlikely positive and funny story that will do much to endear itself to the reader, that makes you want to look at Crisp and admire him for overcoming much adversity. At the same time one does get the feeling that he is rather self-centred and is only thinking of number one, especially when he did have family. Saying that this is a great read.… (more)

Crisp's account of commanding a British tank in the Libyian Desert in 1941 is an account of the terror of taking on the bigger and better German tanks not to mention the deadly 88 -mm antiaircraft guns that the Germans discovered made excellent antitank weapons. The 88s were effective at 3000 yards while the tanks Crisp & company had were only dangerous if they got within 800 yards. This was an uneven playing field that the British had to develope strategy to overcome. This is Crisp's story of how they did it and how they turned the tide.… (more)

From Time Magazine, Feb 1, 1960

The air force, the infantry, the surface warships, and submariners, the merchant marine—all have had their share of glory in the histories and novels of World War II. A noticeable gap is the one left by the men who fought in tanks. They have been mentioned, but seldom in a starring role. Yet their part was often crucial, and their death was often the most fearful—with the victims trapped in a flaming pyre that offered no escape. In Brazen Chariots, a South African major of the British Army, who fought in Greece and later in North Africa against Rommel, tells a story that belongs in the first rank of combat books.

Author Robert Crisp, a journalist in peacetime, describes a kind of war that would seem a surrealist's vision if his style were not so clear, his recollections not so firmly founded in painful reality. Before his war was over, Crisp had been wounded four times, had 17 tanks shot out from under him, and destroyed more than 40 of the enemy armor. He also picked up a D.S.O. and an M.C.

A Sip of Tea. Author Crisp is irreverent and serious by turn. He went into Operation Crusader (against Rommel's forces massed around Tobruk) in November 1941, full of beans and combat vinegar. By the end of the fourth day, "we shed our lightheartedness and eagerness. The sense of adventure had gone out of our lives, to be replaced by grimness and fear and a perpetual, mounting weariness of body and spirit." His U.S.-built MS light tanks—known to Crisp and his men as "Honeys"—mounted 37-mm. guns, whose shells bounced off the heavy German panzers like peas. To knock them out, Crisp and his fellow fighters had to race their tanks around the panzers, shoot them from behind or from the flanks while using one or more of themselves as decoys. For a month sleep averaged a couple of hours a night. A sip of tea became so important that Crisp's men risked death to take time out to brew some. By the end of the ninth day of battle. Crisp's corps had 119 of the 600 tanks with which they had left so airily from Egypt.

Major Crisp, who describes himself as a frightened man who fought to submerge his fears, was always out in front, almost always outnumbered. His picture of the desert terrain is remarkably well drawn—a weird world of sand and escarpments where the battle swirled without seeming aim or purpose except to destroy whatever enemy showed, usually to the surprise of both sides. Friends destroyed each other supposing that they had the enemy in their sights, and Crisp's most sickening memory is that of the day when he himself knocked out a British tank.

A Damn Fine Gunner. He seldom knew how the war was going, and his few bitter passages concern the fact that the brass did not seem to know either. Astonishing chances to destroy the enemy were missed on both sides. For weeks Crisp's comrades were blown up or "fried" all around him. Then his day came. A direct hit, a chunk of steel that stopped just short of his brain, and Tanker Crisp was evacuated from an inferno that he has described better than any other writer. the British won, partly because Rommel made mistakes, but mostly because they had Crisps on their side. One postwar day in a London bar, a young man said to Crisp: "You won't remember me, but we have met before." It was a survivor of the British tank that Crisp had crippled. Recalling the horror of that day, Crisp replied: "I wish to hell I could forget you." But the survivor only grinned. "Bloody good shooting . . . You must have had a damn fine gunner… (more)