Bob George

The summer of 1959 found me stationed at 3 Sigs Squadron in Camp Gagetown, NB — a 19-year-old fresh out of basic and trades training (driver, mechanical transport). I received my orders for the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) deployment in the Gaza Strip. By September, I was airborne on a noisy, slow, North Star with stops in Gander, the Azores, Gibraltar, Pisa, and finally El Arish, Egypt, near the Gaza Strip border. Ground transport from there to Rafah, where I would stay for most of my tour that was cut short to six months when I came down with Infectious Hepatitis. 

My stay in Sharm-el-Sheikh was for one month in December of 1960. Talk about a desolate area!! It hadn’t rained in over twenty years, the heat could be unbearable (no air conditioning), and we only had power during the daytime. I oversaw the PE 95 generator responsible to provide power to meet the Signals establishment requirements. We maintained contact with Gaza HQ by radio and the weekly incoming aircraft from El Arish. This was our only means of supply and rotation of personnel. There was also a small group of Canadian Contingent Engineers who maintained the buildings — such as they were — and operated a water desalination plant for drinking water.

This was the biggest experience of my young life. There were no people or roads in the area. The water and the beaches were untouched. There were millions of shells to find. There was one Bedouin family of three, and a few goats, that passed by one day. Heaven knows what they lived on. There wasn’t a blade of grass to be found. The UN Guard Company was from the Swedish Battalion, and they were a super bunch of people. We were able to learn about people from another country and some of their customs. There was a small detachment north of Sharm, where a group of the Swedes recorded and reported shipping that passed by that narrow spot close to Saudi Arabia. On the way there, there was a well that Moses was supposed to have drunk from on his voyage from Mount Victoria, where he received the Ten Commandments. I didn’t drink from it.

It sounds so desolate — which it was — but it was all so fascinating to a young kid, to be able to explore an area once touched by war in 1948 but virtually untouched since then. There were graveyards, mine fields and no maps. We had to be careful where we went. 

I was sorry to leave there, not knowing that, exactly five years later, I would return to basically the same place I had left. No improvements, no additions, same generator for me to maintain. But it was still an equally exciting place to visit again. This UNEF deployment ended in 1967, when the UN were told by Israel to leave the Gaza Strip in forty-eight hours.

Sharm today has a modern airport where a reported six and a half million people arrive and depart each year. It has at least twenty ‘five-star’ hotels catering to divers. It has an International Convention Centre that just recently hosted thirty-thousand people to an Environmental Conference. Numerous world conferences have been held there.